Bolivia - A glance to the most important achievements of the economic social communitarian productive model

Presentation

Since 2006, under the direction of the President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma, we, the Government and the people, have worked designing a new State and a new economic model based on an analysis of the structural crisis of capitalism and a commitment to change our reality up to then characterized by economic and social exclusion to most Bolivians since the colonization period. Exclusion got worse during the twenty years of neoliberalism before 2006. The Economic Social Communitarian Productive Model was built based on sovereignty of our economic policy.On these grounds, a historic decision about nationalizing the Bolivian hydrocarbons was taken, in accordance with the people’s mandate, adopted after overcoming neoliberal policies. 

By means of that important decision, the State began recovering the control over strategic sectors of the economy, which allowed us, Bolivians, to take control of the economic surplus previously deprived from us; and apply a policy of income redistribution through Conditional Cash Transfers programmes (Juancito Pinto, Dignity Rent, Juana Azurduy,) public investment, inversely proportional wage increases crossed subsidies, among other measures.

Through the Economic Social Communitarian Productive Model, we engaged in strengthening the role of the State that now directs the economy for the purpose of transferring the economic suplus -from strategic sectors-to income-employment generating sectors in order to put together existing structures of economic organization in Bolivia (State, community, social, cooperative and private) under the principles of complementarity, reciprocity, solidarity, redistribution, equality, legal certainty, sustainability, equilibrium, justice and transparency.

In the same vein, we recovered sovereignty on fiscal, monetary, financial and exchange rate policy in order to make them available for the economic and social development of the Bolivian people. Since 2006, for each year we self-design our Fiscal-Financial Programming. Since then, the fiscal policy is focused to achieve growth with income redistribution, output incresing, industrialization, food sovereignty and job creation. We drove de-dollarization of the economy which was before highly dollarized; and we also transformed the financial system in order to go along with the Government’s social objectives. The Government also enhanced and diversified the productive matrix.

It is also important to highlight that because of the implementation of social and income redistribution policies, supported by higher levels of public investment; we managed to stimulate domestic demand now is the main growth engine, which is oriented towards developing productively and industrially our natural resources and eradicating the multiple dimensions of inequity and poverty.

In this document, we describe the main achievements reached since 2006, by means of the implementation of the Economic Social Communitarian Productive Model, which are outcomes from a collective effort to improve the quality of living and reach what we call El Vivir Bien (To Live Well) forBolivian people.

Luis Alberto Arce Catacora
Minister of Economy and Public Finance

Bolivia A Glance to the most important achievements