The country staged a dramatic turnaround in the 2000s thanks to booming prices for its agricultural exports.
A look at three key elements in play as Argentina elects its next president Sunday:
2001 Crisis, 'Vulture Funds'Argentina is still sorting through the fallout of a devastating economic crisis in 2001, when it defaulted on $100 billion in debt -- the largest sovereign default in history at the time.
The country staged a dramatic turnaround in the 2000s thanks to booming prices for its agricultural exports.
Late president Nestor Kirchner renegotiated most of the country's defaulted debt and paid off the $9.5 billion it owed the International Monetary Fund.
Today, Latin America's third-largest economy is one of the least-indebted countries in the world.
But the economic revival started to sputter in 2013. Argentina is facing a recession of 0.7 percent next year, the IMF forecasts.
The government has meanwhile spent beyond its revenues: welfare programs, subsidies for electric bills, automatic pay raises to keep pace with spiralling inflation, an official exchange rate to prop up the peso -- all have fed a budget deficit of six percent of GDP.
The crisis and the debt problem have come back to haunt Kirchner's wife and successor Cristina.
Argentina was pushed into default again last year after defying a US court ruling in favor of two hedge funds suing for full payment on their defaulted bonds.
The bitter legal battle with the "vulture funds," as the government calls them, will fall to the next president to resolve.
Natural Resources, TechArgentina is bursting with natural resources -- often under-exploited.
It has the world's second-largest shale gas reserves, is ranked fourth for shale oil potential and has under-explored gold, copper, silver and lithium reserves.
It has some of the most fertile farmland on Earth, the plains of the Pampa, and is the world's largest exporter of soy flour and oil.
The country has also doubled down on the technology industry.
This month it launched its second geostationary satellite, the first country in Latin America to build them.
It has a world-class nuclear industry with expert technology for power plants in Australia, Algeria and Egypt.
It is also a hub for high-tech agricultural machinery.
Why Claim the Falklands?President Kirchner has vocally restaked her country's long-standing claim to the Falkland Islands, which it fought a bloody war with Britain over in 1982.
The issue stokes patriotic fervor in Argentina, a country that ranked among the richest in the world in the early 20th century and now harbors a certain national resentment at perceived European and American pretensions to superiority.
But beyond waving the flag of nationalism and anti-imperialism, there are strategic stakes: Oil deposits have been discovered in the waters off the Falklands, 500 kilometers (300 miles) from the Argentine coast.
The islands, which Argentina calls the Malvinas, also give Britain a claim to part of Antarctica.