Lourdes Molina, country coordinator of the Central American Institute of Fiscal Studies (Icefi), told journalists on Monday that the Salvadoran economy is slowing down and depends on family remittances that come from abroad.
According to the expert economist, among the challenges facing El Salvador are the reduction of poverty, inequality, unemployment, climate change and the weakening of democracy.
Molina explained to the daily newspaper El Mundo that to achieve “an investment climate it is essential to strengthen the rule of law” and establish a strategy for productive transformation, investment in education and health, but above all a system of checks and balances that provides certainty. to investors in El Salvador.
Molina maintains that based on the government narrative it seems that the country’s economic situation is wonderful, but when we refer to the official indicators it is technically very difficult to talk about achievements, which could be understood as misleading propaganda for electoral purposes by the State. according to experts.
«El Salvador is in a process of economic slowdown and, this year, again, it will be the country in the Central American region that will grow the least (2.2 percent, according to the projections of the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and 2.1 percent, according to ECLAC ),” explained Lourdes Molina.
“We continue to be a country with a trade balance deficit and a high dependence on family remittances. Furthermore, there are concrete and tangible factors for the population such as the increase in the cost of living that make it evident that the economic situation is far from being as the speeches claim,” he continued.
According to or expressed by the expert, the government of Nayib Bukele “must adopt measures that allow progress in a productive transformation, which contributes to generating more and better sources of employment based on strategic sectors with low-carbon growth paths, which promote technological innovation and allow us to build an inclusive, green and sustainable economy.
He also pointed out that one of the government’s challenges is the situation of public finances, to which is added the reduction of poverty, inequality, the generation of quality employment and facing the economic impacts of climate change. All this in a context of democratic weakening and concentration of power, he pointed out.
In relation to Bitcoin, the economist considers that “it is absolutely irresponsible to speculate with public resources in a context in which extreme poverty is increasing and more than half of Salvadorans do not eat adequately.”
Regarding the February elections, Molina considers that “hopefully the different political parties present an electoral offer that is up to the country’s economic challenges,” so that they specify “how they will face the problem, with what measures, specifying “In turn, how many resources they will use to implement them and how they plan to finance them.”