“With respect to Brazil, I think we are also in a fairly favorable situation. In fact, there have been no major shocks in the Uruguayan economy in recent years,” he analyzed.
“The next government is going to have a challenge of whether it will be able to continue tolerating the level of exchange delay that has accumulated or if at least you are going to take measures so that the problem does not continue to worsen. I’m not saying to reverse it, but a lot of that will also depend on what the international context is in 2025, what the prices of the main export products of Uruguay, how the region is, etc. And today all that is under discussion,” said the economist.
And he concluded: “Depending on how the taxes workout this year, especially if the inflation, due to the inflation mechanisms that exist in passivities and salaries at the public sector level. If inflation drops significantly, this increases in real terms the weight of the retirements, the weight of the payroll in the public sector.”
“mediocre” growth
For its part, Martin Vallcorba, A member of the economic teams of the Frente Amplio and an economist from the Complutense universities of Madrid and Alcalá, in addition to Udelar, he defined the country’s growth as “mediocre.”
“On average we are going to be growing at an annual average rate of 1.5% during these five years, which adds to the poor performance that the last five years of the government of the Broad Front. Therefore, as a country, we are going to be accumulating ten years of a growth very low,” he noted.
In this regard, the economist noted: “That, without a doubt, is one of the central challenges that the next administration will have to face. Because if the country does not grow again at rates significantly higher than those we have observed in the last ten years, the conditions will not be able to be generated to be able to finance the set of reforms and transformations that the country will require to address the social emergency and the necessary educational transformation.”
In line with proposals for a future government, Vallcorba pointed out that it will be necessary to “improve international insertion, improve education with a true educational transformation, improve competitiveness and, among other things, we thus have a problem derived from exchange delay relevance that Uruguayan production has faced in the last two years and also necessary advances in an agenda of promotion and competition defense in the markets, which has also been absent in this period of government.”
In his speech, the economist Juan Dubra, research professor at the University of Montevideo and doctor in economics from New York University, positively valued the government’s policy in the area. “I think it was good, especially the handling part.” pandemic, and now they are going to finish correcting the excess expenses due to the pandemic,” he began.
And he continued: “We are going to have finished the period with reasonable growth, progress was made with the tax rule, with a growth of 80,000 jobs, with a rate of employment very good, recovery real salary even after the pandemic, so it seems to me that it was good management of the economy in general.”
Dutra advocated that for the end of this administration, issues such as “the reduction of regulations that cause there to be unnecessary price increases, “What has to do with importing fruits and vegetables, importing chicken, making technical issues with trade more flexible, which would do the country very good.”
Martín Vallcorba.jpeg
Competition and prices
Prices were one of the central topics handled by economists during the working breakfast convened by ADM. “Competition issues are central, in general, in any economy, particularly in a small economy like ours, the policy of promotion and defense of competition should be a central aspect of the government agenda, and there we have a very important,” said Vallcorba.
For his part, Michele Santo explained that the characteristics of the Uruguay Having a small-scale economy “means that we have to have a State with services that are more difficult to pay for. It has already been said that we are a neighborhood of Saint Paul or of Buenos Aires, But we have to have foreign service, we have to have police, we have to have army.”
“We have to have a lot of things that obviously become more onerous. If we want to have a coverage system social Security like the one we have, very extensive, where the coverage is quite reasonable, you have to pay for it. They do not come from abroad to pay us 16 points of GDP in retirement and pension expenses,” he stated.
At the time of his speech, Dubra was emphatic when stating that “Uruguayans do not like competence, No way around it. Pharmacies, well, they can’t be close to each other. Supermarkets? Oh, no, to open a supermarket you have to do a study of the unsatisfied demand in the neighborhood. And that is incredible, and that is for large surfaces.”
“In Uruguay, To open a 300-meter supermarket, you have to do a study of unsatisfied demand, which is a demonic thing. Afterwards, the determination of which fruit or vegetable is imported depends on what the producers think,” he complained.
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Social security reform
The rejection of the possibility that through the collection of signatures promoted by the PIT-CNT a constitutional reform is approved on the retirement reform It was another of the topics where there was harmony between the speakers.
For Vallcorba, the idea of a referendum “is frankly negative, not only from the point of view of financial sustainability, but also due to undesired consequences in terms of equity. Therefore, I think it is not a good path.”
“On another note, this constitutional reform does not repeal the recent Government reform, but rather takes us back to a situation that is Last century. So, it is not a response to this reform that undoubtedly has problems and will undoubtedly have to be addressed,” he expressed.
“For me, the proposed reform is very bad, it throws back an enormous amount of things and it is like distributing, shuffling and distributing again things that go back 20 years. The issue of individual accounts seems fundamental to me and there is also the issue that there are Uruguayans who have dedicated themselves to studying what happens when there is a big cake like the AFAPs and how difficult it is to maintain them if you do not have adequate institutionality,” Dubra pointed out in turn.
Source: Ambito
