Luis Alberto Arce has been Bolivia’s economy minister for 10 years, ever since president Evo Morales – now serving his third term – took office for the first time. In an exclusive interview with The Banker in his 19th-floor office in the capital, La Paz, Mr Arce says: “Right from the start, the government adopted a different economic approach.”
First, he says the state took control of a number of the country’s utilities and key commodities industries, including oil and natural gas. Second, through redistributive policies, it targeted the country’s poorest citizens with investments in health and education and basic infrastructure, as well as large conditional cash transfer programmes. As a result, over the past decade the government has reduced the poverty rate by 20 percentage points to 17%, a big social gain.
