Economics on Wednesday

Panama's economy is practically under normal conditions (besides wearing facemasks all the time and a lot of unemployment). We can go out on Sundays now, which will create a little more demand in the country. However, with unemployment still hovering around 20%, there is not much to expect, so you have to resort to many tricks to reach the pockets of those who have work, money and who can generate some demand. So, what can we do now? Let's begin to delve into the details of what entrepreneurs can do to first survive and open, and then gradually return to normal conditions. One of the new trends that are resulting from the pandemic is that, as the Americans say, "less is more". From there to that at this moment we are seeing how large corporations are looking to reduce their operation, but not reducing without analyzing it, but they are looking for technological solutions for process issues that before they preferred not to change, but that the pandemic has made you ...

  We are already in the month of October 2020, a year that will go down in the history of the world as a year full of surprises, especially bad ones, but from which, as always, we will recover. Even though to date, the INEC has not provided any figures to be able to measure the economy properly, we have certain data that will allow us to infer, calculate and analyze how we are at this moment, and be able to make a forecast of how we will close the 2020 and a first attempt at how we see 2021. It is important to remember how we closed 2019, with a GDP growth of 3%, unemployment of 7.1%, inflation of -0.8%, a Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) of $ 4.8 billion, a debt of $ 28,000, and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 39%, a fiscal deficit of the central government of 3.85%, figures that although they have been deteriorating, especially in the last five years, still maintain us as a prosperous country, not only in the region but in the world. Panama needs to grow at a rate of 5% per year in GDP...

Panama and Costa Rica have a lot of history together. We are neighbors, we had a border “war” 100 years ago, there are families of the same kind in both countries, there is a lot of trade between both countries. We both became independent from Spain in 1821, Costa Rica along with the other Central American nations, and Panama as part of Bolívar's dream, which made us join Gran Colombia until we were able to become independent from Colombia in 1903. They have many similarities, the tropical climate (even though San José has a more pleasant climate), they are the southernmost nations of the Central American isthmus and that is why they are something apart from the other Central American nations, they have coasts in the Pacific Ocean and in the Caribbean, and are strategically located so that the hurricanes that devastated the Caribbean do not touch them. However, they are also very different. Their idiosyncrasy/culture is somewhat different, their capital cities have developed diff...

Those who have followed me since 2007 when I started writing this column know my economic and financial positions on certain topics. One of them is about the actions taken by this country to be able to “get out” of the lists of any color in which any country, region, organism or pseudo organism wants to put us. Panama has been fighting foreign banking competition since the 1970s. First, it was Miami, accusing us of money laundering of the drug traffickers, when in Miami they laundered money right and left. Obviously, Noriega and his cronies of the time allowed the establishment of two banks linked to the Medellín and Cali cartels, but by 1990 they had already left the system. But this slip was not of the Panamanian people, it was a matter of a narco dictator and his cronies, which unfortunately embarrassed us all. From then on, Panama has changed many laws and has improved a lot (it was obvious since we went from a narco dictatorship to 30 years of democracy and a rule of law with ...