Awards for Excellence country winners: El Salvador

El Salvador’s economy is performing poorly considering that its president Nayib Bukele recently won a landslide presidential election. His popularity belies an economy that has been blighted by high inflation, rising poverty and low growth.

However, Bukele’s success was down to his dramatic approach to the country’s organized crime problem – the cost of extortion topped at 3% of GDP according to some estimates. Now, his administration argues, the focus is to build on the social stability that his law-and-order programme has created. There are plans for investment in education to improve the country’s workforce – a laudable but long-term objective – and foreign direct investment has been slowly improving in recent years. The biggest issue is agreeing a debt deal with the IMF, but the country’s official adoption of bitcoin is proving to be a sticking point to these negotiations – and the cryptocurrency’s rise won’t encourage the government to change this policy.

The coming years are going to be interesting for the country’s banks.