Corporate Responsibility Weblog - Instituto de Empresa Business School

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June 15, 2006

There is great potential for Latin Ameria and the Caribbean - Bill Clinton

Max Oliva, Associate Director of IE's Social Impact Management

Latin America should carry out microeconomic reforms to clear the path for more poor people to join the middle class, instead of locking itself in a debate over fiscal discipline and social spending, former U.S. president Bill Clinton said today. This conversation has just taken place during the Building Opportunity for the Majority conference.

“If you put yourself in a position of having yesterday’s debate, that is fiscal responsibility versus more social spending, you’re going to wind up with disappointment because you won’t reduce inequality either way,” he said. “And you don’t want to just appropriate the assets of the state, or the assets of the wealthy. What you want to do is to empower poor people to create wealth and become middle class”.

According to the former president, microeconomic reforms are a process that can only be done by trial and error and requires a long-term commitment from governments and international institutions to create the right conditions for poor entrepreneurs to prosper. Among the needed reforms he mentioned identity registration, legal recognition of property rights, elimination of bureaucratic barriers to entrepreneurship and enforcement of contracts.

According to Clinton, Hernando de Soto, president of the Lima, Peru-based Instituto Libertad y Democracia, has championed such reforms. The former will be on June 26th at Oviedo, Spain, on the 1st European-Ibero American Congress on Corporate Responsibility.

Get full access to Clinton’s conference review.