By Lorenza Gabriel Dávalos Baigorria
Lately, a deep controversy has been opened in Bolivia around the first measures that should be adopted by the future president to face the serious economic crisis that our country suffers. Especially the validity of a project presented by the company has been discussed in its different sectors grouped in the Multisectoral Committee called “starting point for the reconstruction of the Bolivian economy”.
It is an extensive and thorough project, issued in the terms of all the actors of the economy, which provides for the repeal or modification of a large number of laws in force and the elimination of more than 100 regulatory frameworks of various activities, both tax and labor.
The meaning of the project is clear: it aims to quickly initiate a transformation of the economic structure that has been distorted throughout the last two decades by the outgoing mass government, until it reaches this point where the country is on the verge of falling into an inflationary spiral, with a high percentage of the population in poverty and paralyzed production.
The diagnosis has been clearly expressed again and again during the presidential campaigns and even with greater force in this second round. Economic and production actors, more than concerned, make a clamor for deep changes expressed by citizens. Within the same line, the exceptional economic crisis situation, produced by the oversized the size of the state, which first led to indebtedness and then to the issuance of bills indiscriminately, has been recognized by specialists and politicians, and clearly explained in the initial recitals of the project.
The problem is not merely conjunctural, these are years, decades, statist policies, planning, who suffocated the economic process in frank violation of the rights recognized by the country’s constitution. It is like a car progressing at full speed towards a concrete wall, which urgently needs to modify its direction to avoid catastrophe. We have already lived the experience. The difference between sustained inflation and hyperinflation such as 85, which completely eliminates the value of money, is a jump that occurs rapidly, and the consequences are lethal, especially in a country that already accumulates the consequences of statism in terms of levels of poverty, lack of work and investment.
In short, after many years, a solution can be given. The severity of the crisis demands that legislators assume their responsibilities and do not in a merely declamatory way, but knowing that what they decide or does not decide on this issue will have dramatic consequences for the future of the country. Hopefully the elected government will take into account the project presented by sectors that spontaneously already managed to capture ideas to change the country course.
* Lorenza Gabriel Dávalos Baigorria, President Caeco – Bolivia
