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At a June 19 address to the Panamanian Business Executives Association (APEDE), dark horse presidential candidate Ricardo Martinelli posited clean government and public works projects as his prescriptions to revive Panama’s troubled economy.

The supermarket baron, who served as head of the Social Security Fund during the Pérez Balladares administration and as Canal Affairs Minister under Mireya Moscoso, is unlikely to lead his little Cambio Democratico party to power next year. However, in Panama as well as a lot of other countries, ideas first raised by small parties without a chance of winning have often been adopted by mainstream candidates and ruling parties, particularly when they prove to be popular on the campaign trail. Before his speech Martinelli gamely predicted to The Panama News that in the last 10 days before the May 2004 election voters will decide that they don’t like the front runners and turn to him, but even if the possibility of that is remote, he and his ideas may well affect the outcome of the contest.

“We have to defeat corruption because corruption represents an economic cost,” Martinelli began. “Corruption is the fundamental problem facing Panama,” he continued. “Here we have one law for some, and another for others, [but] we need the rule of law to attract foreign investment.” He noted a paltry $30 million in foreign investment this past year and said that this is directly attributable to Panama’s bad reputation for corruption.

Noting that most jobs are created by micro-enterprises, Martinelli said that each permit that is required to conduct business “is a little bit of corruption” that hits all private enterprises but especially the smallest ones. He advocated a vast reduction and simplification of procedures both to encourage tiny businesses and to move a lot of this sector from the underground economy into a formal relationship with the government.

Mainly, though, Martinelli’s recipe for economic recovery is a classical Keynesian one, public investment in large-scale construction projects.

He’s for the construction of a larger third set of locks for the Panama Canal, which would necessarily entail the building of one or more new dams to trap the water needed to run those locks. With the dirt and rock that would have to be removed to make the Pacific side locks, Martinelli proposes to build a causeway and artificial island off of the former Howard Air Force Base and turn that landfill into the largest seaport on the Pacific Ocean.

It seems that he also has some ideas for Howard. “Tocumen is a bottleneck,” Martinelli argued. “We have to have four or five international airports.

The Cambio Democratico standard bearer also called for a new highway all along the Atlantic coast of Panama, a third bridge over the canal in Colon, the widening of the last unimproved sections of the Pan-American Highway and rural road projects to help farmers get their produce to market.

Martinelli is looking to several places for the financing of this list of projects. Taiwan has said it would like to participate in financing the modernization of the Panama Canal, and he seems ready to take them up on that. He wants to revitalize this country’s relationship with the United States, in part to attract more US investment. He argues that there is a lot of liquidity in Panama’s banks because there just hasn’t been much for them to invest in lately. Finally, he points to the remainder of the Fiduciary Fund created by the sale of state-owned enterprises during the Pérez Balladares administration as Panama’s last big card to play in the development finance game.



Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Martinelli's economic plan
The Arnulfista nominee

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