“The government's commitment must be to restart the economy and it must attract serious investments,” he explained in an interview with Diario El Mundo, pointing out that this is the challenge of a second term in office for President Nayib Bukele needs to attract foreign investment “seriously,” but warned of a downside: El Salvador is expensive.
Acevedo touched on several issues, including education and the pension system. With an efficient investment in education, El Salvador could achieve greater success in ten years. In order to make the pension system sustainable, it was proposed to increase the retirement age and the contribution rate to 21 percent of the statutory basic salary, he emphasized. Elaborating on the achievements of the current government, he said that security is the most important economic achievement, but it is related to the economy, because in order to solve the security problem structurally and comprehensively, poverty must be reduced.
To achieve the full economic impact, this must be accompanied by attracting foreign investment because if the government fails to attract foreign investment, this economy will not grow, he predicted.
The analyst and doctor of economics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, USA, estimated that it is imperative for the government to release from prison innocent people captured under the emergency regime.
This problem, he said, requires social investments and social investments require resources and resources do not fall from the sky so that the government is not able to make these investments, because you could say: public investments, no: there is no capacity. Private investment can work, but the key here is to attract foreign direct investment, he stressed.
In terms of attracting investment, he noted that this will be the biggest challenge for Bukele if he wins re-election. He estimated that with current growth it will not be possible to make social investments and “we will face the crisis and find ourselves in a state of macroeconomic and social vulnerability, which will complicate things for us.”
He pointed out that El Salvador has a very mediocre foreign direct investment record and the main problem, once security is sorted out, is that El Salvador is an expensive country. When an investor decides where to come to Central America, he is unlikely to choose El Salvador.
In another part of his assessment, Acevedo noted that Bitcoin is not a safe asset for foreign investment, especially given current prices despite a slight recovery.
He also pointed out that in this “government, tolerance of criticism is not its greatest strength, we have seen that it cannot stand being criticized and people raising critical voices from the entire government media lynching machine are being attacked, that’s obvious. “We have to correct it.”
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