MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Latam estimated to grow 3% in 2009, says IDB

Latinamerica will grow 3% in 2009, below the 4 to 4.5% forecasted for this year said on Friday the president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Luis Alberto Moreno.

”

"What's going to happen next year is very difficult to anticipate because we are going to have recessions in the United States, European union and Japan, so growth will be closer to 3%", said Moreno who is currently visiting Uruguay. "We have to wait and see how fast the crisis can be reversed and how fast liquidity and confidence is rebuilt", added Moreno. However he said that Latinamerica "has great resilience to tackle this global financial crisis". Latam expanded 5.7% in 2007. Moreno pointed out that the region currently has a current account surplus and international reserves increased from 160 billion to 400 billion US dollars in the past four years. "So it has more capability to tackle this crisis compared to previous situations". In the region "we had 31 crises during the last 25 years and no countries lost more than 10 points of the GDP", Moreno said. He praised the economic management of the Chilean President Michelle Bachelet for having a sustained fiscal surplus of 5% of GDP and taken advantage of the positive circumstance to amass savings for future downturns. However Moreno criticized Argentina that "with economic growth averaging 9% annually should have saved more resources for the bad times".