Speakers:

• Marta Lucía Ramírez, Vice President of Colombia
• Reina Irene Mejía, CEO of Citi Honduras
• Susana García-Robles, Executive Advisor to the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America (LAVCA)
• Roberto Simon, Senior Director for Policy, AS/COA @robertosimon (moderator)

Nearly half of Latin American women lack a bank account, let alone access to credit for small businesses. With this in mind, experts came together in an AS/COA panel to discuss how to overcome the region’s barriers to financial inclusion for women. Colombian Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez recognized that women face steep structural and cultural hurdles, saying, “Unpaid care work has been exacerbated during the COVID crisis further jeopardizing women’s economic empowerment and employment," and that the pandemic has further jeopardized women’s access to finance. She shared the Colombian government’s efforts to promote women entrepreneurs through direct technical assistance.

Head of Citi Honduras Reina Irene Mejía highlighted that the region has the highest percentage of women in small businesses but only 30 percent of these women get access to credit due to high collateral and guarantee requirements, noting that: “The average loan for a female entrepreneur is 40 percent less than what a man receives due to unconscious gender bias.” She also discussed that working on unconscious gender bias will be crucial to shifting these numbers. Private capital investor Susana García-Robles spoke about a new awareness in the venture capital field abbout the importance of investing in women entrepreneurs and known groups building a culture to support women, like We Invest. “Research shows that if you ignore half of the population in the world you are going to lose and miss out," said García-Robles.

Speakers:

• Otaviano Canuto, Principal, Center for Macroeconomics and Development
• Nancy Lee, Senior Policy Fellow, Center for Global Development
• Bosco Marti, Former Executive Director for Mexico and the Dominican Republic, Inter-American Development Bank
• Cecilia Tornaghi, Managing Editor, Americas Quarterly (moderator)

Latin America is one the hardest hit economic regions by the COVID-19 pandemic, with regional GDP expected to contract by 9.4 percent in 2020, per the International Monetary Fund. With this in mind, experts on an AS/COA panel discussed how institutions such as the IDB and the IMF can adapt their approaches to lending in the region. Nancy Lee said the Center for Global Development predicts international financial institutions will have to direct between $200 and 300 billion to Latin America, in addition to the 10 percent of countries’ GDP they supply via stimulus and social payments. Otaviano Canuto talked about how calls for debt restructuring are more accepted now but reminded attendees that these organizations are “helpers, not saviors.” Bosco Marti said the election for the next president of the IDB, the first virtual vote in the history of the organization, still needs the required quorum to go ahead with the vote.

Speakers:

• Juan Pablo del Valle, Chairman of Orbia
• Margaret Franklin, CEO of CFA Institute
• Stanley Motta, Chairman of Copa Holdings
• Brian Winter, Editor-in-Chief, Americas Quarterly (moderator)

In this panel with executives, leaders discussed ethics and business in times of COVID-19, covering topics such as the a whole new scenario for business and the opportunities for both public- and private-sector initiatives to drive social responsibility and values in these times. Orbia Chairman Juan Pablo del Valle spoke about the differences between the impact on human behavior and the economics of this crisis, saying, "The hardest thing has been the human side of this." He highlighted the importance of retaining talent so that it's there tomorrow when you need it. CFA CEO Margaret Franklin expressed doubt that anyone operating in capital markets has ever experienced change like this. She said that despite the stresses the pandemic creates in a business environment, it also creates opportunity to "redraft that which we have held on to and believed couldn't be changed." Copa Holdings Chairman Stanley Motta pointed out the vulnerability of the world, and how a leading issue to deal with is the environment, questioning also how to deal with the economics and the health crisis at the same time, saying, "We can no longer be sitting across the table from each other, we have to be at a roundtable dealing with the problem." 

Speakers:

• Lee Buchheit, Professor, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
• Augusto de la Torre, Director, Economics Research Center, Universidad de las Américas, Ecuador
• Susan Segal, President and CEO, Americas Society/Council of the Americas (introduction)

“We may be on the cusp of a systemic sovereign debt crisis of the kind we haven’t seen since the 1980s, where you have multiple countries forced to restructure their sovereign debt simultaneously,” said Lee Buchheit at the AS/COA panel. “None of us knows when this pandemic will abate, none of us can be sure what the world economy will look like, but if the situation turns out to be as gristly as the IMF seems to think it might be, we could have 10, 15, 20, 25 countries forced into a debt restructuring more or less at the same time.” Buchheit compared and contrasted the current scenario with the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, in the aftermath of which 27 countries globally were forced to restructure their sovereign debt.

The experts then touched on Ecuador’s debt restructuring process of 2008, "a case where a country did not pay and it could have paid,” as Augusto de la Torre described it. “Then-President Rafael Correa had run on a platform in which he said he was going to obtain significant debt relief in the country if he was elected,” said Buchheit, who added that if any financial officer had used the same moves as Correa, he or she would have ended up in prison. It was a “morally wrong outcome” said Buchheit, who also discussed so-called “odious debt” as it related to the Correa administration. Regarding other South American countries, Buchheit gave an overview of Uruguay's aggregated clause strategy of 2003 and noted that Argentina has recently revised its offer “very considerably in favor of the creditors.”

Speakers

• Arminio Fraga, Founding Partner, Gávea Investimentos
• William R. Rhodes, Chairman Emeritus, AS/COA; President, William R. Rhodes Global Advisors LLC
• Susan Segal, President and CEO, Americas Society/Council of the Americas

On July 22, Council of the Americas hosted a discussion with Arminio Fraga, Brazilian economist and president of the Central Bank of Brazil from 1999-2003; William R. Rhodes, president of William R. Rhodes Global Advisors LLC; and Susan Segal, president and CEO of AS/COA. Panelists offered a historic perspective and lessons learned from past economic crises and debt restructurings in the region.