Eduardo González
The First Vice President of the Government and Minister of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, and the President of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Mauricio Claver-Carone, have “conspired” to increase both the presence of Spanish companies in Latin America and Spain’s participation in the Bank’s activity.
“The IDB is a fundamental and very special institution for Spain” and, therefore, Spain wants to continue promoting its “privileged relations” with this institution “at all levels, both as shareholders of the bank and at the government level,” said Nadia Calviño during her speech at the event Vision 2025: Reinventing the Americas, organized yesterday by ICEX Spain Export and Investment in collaboration with the IDB Group. The meeting was presented by the CEO of ICEX, María Peña, and was attended by the heads of some fifteen Spanish companies with economic interests in Latin America and the Caribbean.
For this reason, Calviño continued, “since my first conversation with the president of the IDB, we have been working together to increase the presence of Spanish companies in the region and to increase Spain’s activity in the IDB”. “The Bank’s president can count on us to strengthen the IDB’s role in the region” and, for this reason, Spain has reiterated its desire to host “the meeting of the Group’s president with all the extra-regional member countries, preparatory to the Board of Governors”, scheduled for March 2022 in Punta del Este (Uruguay).
Spain is one of more than 20 non-borrowing countries of the IDB, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Israel, South Korea, China and 16 European countries. Membership in this group allows Spain to provide financial support to the IDB and to participate with voting rights on the Bank’s Board of Governors and Board of Executive Directors. At the moment there is no date for the meeting of extra-regional members, although, in any case, it would be held in early 2022.
For his part, Mauricio Claver-Carone expressed his “gratitude for Spain’s role and for its State policy of support for Latin America and the Caribbean within the EU”, because “if it were not for Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean would go unnoticed in Brussels”. “That is why one of my first measures as president of the IDB was to move the representation in Europe from Brussels to Madrid” because “Spain is Europe’s gateway to the region,” he added.
In fact, the IDB headquarters in Europe has been in Madrid since 2012 and the move to Brussels had been decided by his predecessor in office, Luis Alberto Moreno. Therefore, what Claver-Carone did was to keep it in the Spanish capital. The American, of Spanish and Cuban origin, took office in October 2020, after winning the support of 30 of the Bank’s 48 governors, including 23 of the 28 regional governors. Spain’s vote was not known. His appointment had been proposed by the U.S. Treasury Department in June 2020 and marked a departure from the historical trend of reserving the presidency of the institution for nationals of borrowing member countries.
According to Claver-Carone (an American of Spanish and Cuban origin), “the Spanish business sector has changed a lot, and Latin America and the Caribbean are no longer necessarily the first choice for Spanish companies.” “They are a global reference not only in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also in the United States and Germany,” and, therefore, the IDB’s double challenge is to ensure that “Spain continues to be one of the business leaders in the region” and to work with “the countries of the region so that the regulatory frameworks for investment are conducive.”
Spanish companies, he continued, must play a “leading role” for Latin America and the Caribbean to achieve “a faster recovery and truly sustainable development”. “We cannot miss the historic opportunity to transform the region” and Spanish companies have, “once again, the opportunity to play this key role”, as they already did “after the foreign debt crisis in the 1980s”, warned the IDB president, who explained to the Spanish businessmen the Vision 2025, the IDB strategy whose five pillars are the reinforcement of climate action, the relocation of value chains, digitalization, gender equality in the labor market and the strengthening of small and medium-sized enterprises.