María Eugenia Estenssoro was always interested in the social, economic and political development of Argentina and Uruguay in Latin America. The co-author of the book Argentina Innovadora and Laboratorio Uruguay – which will be published in 2023 by the Random House publishing house – was born in Bolivia but grew up in Argentina where she studied journalism (to which she added specializations abroad) and also traveled a path in the policy that lasted 12 years and led her to be a deputy in the city of Buenos Aires.
Throughout her life, her leitmotif was to know in depth how the most advanced democracies had done “and what we could learn from that,” the NewLabs advisor points out in an interview with Café & Negocios.
In this frame, His gaze towards developed countries is not limited to the United States, but also points to other nations that have had rapid growth in recent years, such as Israel, South Korea or Ireland.. “Many countries that were more backward than ours and realized 30 years ago that the world was changing, took a leap and today are much more prosperous,” reflects Estenssoro.
Focusing on Uruguay, the journalist considers that the country is “in a historical, unique moment” and compares it to the end of the 19th century, “when he decided to have a good education to train the nascent democracy and when he developed all that agro-export model.” At that time, Uruguay made good alliances with the world and, at the same time, received an important migratory flow. “Its growth rate was very high and its GDP was similar to that of European countries at that time,” he assesses. Currently, the author does not hesitate to affirm that Uruguay did its homework fulfilling the contracts after the 2002 crisis and preserving its political stability, institutional strength and legal certainty, qualities that make it attractive for medium and long-term investments ” in a world that is a quagmire”.
“It is at the right time, but it still does not have a clear country policy”, “it does not have a clear strategy in terms of being an innovation hub for the world”, analyzes Estenssoro. In this plane, he maintains that there is a word that is absent in the speech of our leaders: “it is the word future”. However, he highlights the commitment to innovation of the President of the Republic himself, Luis Lacalle Pou, and of the Ministers of Industry, Energy and Mining, and Economy and Finance (Omar Paganini and Azucena Arbeleche, respectively). For her, the future “is not something that happens”, but is planned, decided and organized, “later there are a lot of contingencies, but if you don’t know where you are going it is difficult to get very far”.
Spinning finer, the author understands that the government led by Lacalle Pou has a plan, but that it is “pulled” by daily demands. In this sense, the former Buenos Aires legislator evaluates that the country cannot continue to be an exporter of raw materials, but rather has to aspire to maintain this model and improve it; in short, to determine “what Uruguay is going to live on in the next 20 years”.
