The Bolivian banking system has proved resilient in the face of some severe shocks in the past few years. Luis Fernando Calvo Unzueta, the superintendent of banks and financial institutions in Bolivia, says: “I think in few parts of the world the banking system has been exposed to the sort of stresses that Bolivia has had to endure in the past few years but the system has withstood them.”
According to the Association of Private Banks (APB) in Bolivia, the level of financial assets has dropped by 40% to $2.6bn since 1998 and bank profitability has fallen by an equal amount over the period. Total deposits as a measure of gross domestic product are 32% today compared with 54% in 1998.
