Colombia: Gustavo Petro proposes reactivation with forced investments and decarbonization

He President of Colombia, Gustavo Petropresented this Friday some details of the plan economic revival which will be promoted by his Government and which includes a commitment to clean energy and decarbonisation, as well as “forced investments“that lead to a productive economy.

This was announced during his speech at the closing of the Economic Reactivation Forum, in which members of the Government, led by the Ministry of Commerce, and representatives of five key sectors of the economy participated. Colombian economy: tourism, agriculture, housing, transportation and energy.

“If we manage to combine forced investments with a financing law organized around and within the transition to a productive economy, we would have the possibility of economic revival that would change the possibilities of capitalism and production models“Petro said.

These forced investments, he explained, consist of “Taking a portion of public savings to invest in production activities is in the bank’s interest because its portfolio is currently deteriorating.”.

Regarding decarbonization, after defending a “decarbonized capitalism“, said: “The world is not buying the same amount of coal that was bought from us before, the trend is not temporary, it is permanent. The trend will continue to go down, the demand for coal will continue to go down until it reaches a trend of 0.″.

For this reason, he insisted that “A transformation towards clean energy would give the country enormous competitiveness. Colombian economy”: “We need to move towards new methods, new ideas, new perspectives if we want to overcome the crisis that is taking place and join in the construction of a new economy.”.

Another of the main themes of his speech, which lasted more than an hour, was tax reform, which would include lowering the corporate income tax rate, and he argued that a social pact is needed to pay taxes.

The president added that this financing law could remove taxes from tourism and clean energy.

“We removed taxes on tourism and clean energy, yes; but where do we put the taxes? First of all, on oil and coal, which the Constitutional Court did not want because it took away half of our tax reform and that is why we have to do another one.“, according to the Colombian president.

All these proposals “would change the development system of Colombia, developing capitalism with other forms of production”.