PRESIDENT SANTOS SAYS THE COUNTRY WILL HAVE FISCAL EQUILIBRIUM THIS YEAR

PRESIDENT SANTOS SAYS THE COUNTRY WILL HAVE FISCAL EQUILIBRIUM THIS YEAR

President Juan Manuel Santos in the inauguration of the Economic and Competitive dialogue with employers said the country is doing fine in economics. In his words: “we can say without doubt that the performance of the economy has been a very positive performance. Very positive”.

The president referred to the international crisis and say that the country is well but not fully protected against it. “We are not fully shielded, we are better protected, but no country can fully insulate themselves from the effects of an international crisis”

Santos remarked that the goal of the country is to keep doing well economically over time and sustain growth in the long term. How to prolong the cycle and how to sow the lean cycle as short as possible he proposed “doing an analysis of what we have done, we can extrapolate and identify where we must act more decisively.”

President Santos also remembered his time as Finance minister in which no one would loan to Colombia and compare that time to today’s situation in which “Colombia can afford to say that we are among the first 15 to 20 countries with the lowest spreads around the planet.”

Another important part of the speech is the Job creation where he reported that Colombian economy created 2 million jobs in the last two years from July 2010 to June 2012, in a world that is destroying jobs. Also is very important the poverty reduction 200k poor less. “That is, one million 200 thousand fellows entered the middle class… More than 670 000 out of extreme poverty to poverty”

But the most important part of the speech was on the related to governmental sustainability, according to Santos the big investments in infrastructure, education and others have to be equilibrated with a tax regime, within a policy of fiscal responsibility, very important in these times of financial instability.

President Santos said: “We proposed, in the campaign, committing to reach fiscal balance at the end of 2014. We are anticipating. If we continue as we are, we will find what the experts defined as fiscal balance at the end of this year. We received a deficit of 3.6. Last year we ended the year with a little fewer than 2. And this year we close the year, all things being equal, close to 1, which is already defined as a fiscal balance.