“The financial sector has a structural problem in that the ratio of credit to GDP is the same today as in 1975. It’s a very low number and it’s stagnant,” Colombia’s finance minister, Alberto Carrasquilla, tells me at the Inter-American Development Bank annual meeting in Belo Horizonte in Brazil.
Reforms that are being considered by the government to address this problem include strengthening property rights – the critical point about emerging market reform that is always being advanced by Hernando de Soto, the head of the Lima-based think tank Liberty and Democracy Institute. He argues that while property rights are inadequate, poor people cannot participate properly in economic progress.
