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Editor's Note: Roberto Rave is a political scientist with a specialization and postgraduate degree in international business and foreign trade from the Externado University of Colombia and Columbia University of New York. With studies in Management from the IESE University of Spain and an MBA candidate from the University of Miami. He is a columnist for the Colombian economic newspaper La República. He was chosen by the Republican International Institute as one of the 40 most influential young leaders on the continent. The comments expressed in this column belong exclusively to the author.
(CNN Spanish) - The fourth revolution advances by leaps and bounds. His arrival has agitated the Latin American economy in an important way. And even with my firm convictions about the importance of the free market, it has impacted me from the human point of view to see what many of the new platforms imply in the life of the citizens of the region. Latin America has significant unemployment figures and in this sense, decent and dignified employment is necessary that provides the opportunity to get ahead of all the citizens of the region.
According to figures from the World Labor Organization, informality hits nearly 140 million workers in the region, almost 53% of those employed.
By 2017, the figures of the World Economic Forum already indicated that the Latin American economy exceeded informality rates in sub-Saharan Africa for the first time: 27 million young people start a working life outside the security and opportunity that formality implies.
The arrival of the platforms has revolutionized the world of employment, but it has also widened the gaps caused by legal gaps that make new players enter the game with different rules, generating more informality. The platforms promise easy and fast employment. As intermediaries, they wash their hands of the obligations that by law a company should have with those who access the work. In fact, temporary intermediaries or companies are also subject to obligations with their employees.
The economist Hernando de Soto said that one should not formalize informality but informalize formality. These big problems are the result of large states that want to control everything and that, in addition, wanting to order everything, mess up everything, leaving large gaps that generate distortions and inequality of opportunity when competing.
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Technological developments and the new economic revolution should not be stopped. However, these advances must be forced not to distort the importance of the free market and also of healthy competition and on equal terms.
The State has imposed historical barriers to the entry of many services and industries. These barriers have been met for years by many companies and this must be taken into account. The free market as a whole is a utopia for Latin America. An utopia towards which we must march without forgetting that the transition must be careful with those who fulfilled the rules of the game for decades.
The fact that there are rules that are not related or encourage economic growth from a conception of the free market does not mean that the State should not guarantee equality before the law. In fact, I believe that one way to stimulate growth is to reduce state interventions in the economy to a minimum. I will continue to disseminate the importance of a smaller, less bureaucratic and less interventionist State, without violating the liberal importance of equality before the law.
The distortions generated - not by companies but by the State and its long compendiums of economic rules and laws - are, in this case, generating more informality and poverty.
Poverty
