Senior fellow Liliana Rojas Suarez is quoted in a Financial Times article on the Andean Development Corporation.
As Latin America’s economies have recovered since the so-called “lost decade” of the 1980s when hyperinflation and financial crises were the norm, so the region’s development bank, the Corporación Andina de Fomento (Andean Development Corporation, or CAF), has gone from strength to strength.
The CAF’s lending operations have doubled in the past five years to $15bn, and the bank’s president, Enrique García, told the FT in an interview this year that he expected them to double again over the next five years, with a particular focus on supporting regional integration and infrastructure.
Liliana Rojas Suarez, is a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, where she heads its Latin America initiative.
She says: “The answer is simple: they have incredibly high standards of governance and minimise transaction costs.”
Ms Rojas Suarez describes the CAF as a “model of efficiency”, which is one of the factors that has enabled it to attain an investment grade credit rating – despite being composed of member countries that are not investment grade – although having 14 private banks among its members has injected an element of market discipline.
This allows the CAF to provide quicker and easier answers for its borrowers than other lenders. Ms Rojas Suarez says: “Where do you go if you want to get the job done quickly? You go to the CAF.”