‘You can’t just bet everything on exports’: as its gas runs out, is Bolivia doomed to repeat history? — SkimNews
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- Bolivia's gas-fueled economic boom from 2006 to 2014 lifted GDP and halved poverty rates, but the 2014 commodity crash and depleting reserves reversed those gains — some imported staples in La Paz markets have since doubled in price, according to vendor Felipa Huanca.
- Evo Morales nationalized hydrocarbons in 2006 and renegotiated contracts with foreign companies, but successive governments funneled profits into fuel subsidies, heavy state spending, and a fixed dollar peg rather than industrial diversification, locking Bolivia into a classic rentier state model.
- Bolivian elites hold an estimated $10bn (£7.4bn) offshore — roughly an eighth of national GDP, which economist Andrés Arauz calls an underestimate — while the informal labour sector grew to 84% in 2024, Latin America's highest.
- President Rodrigo Paz's government cut fuel subsidies in December with no protections for the vulnerable, triggering protests demanding his resignation, and redirected the state hydrocarbons firm toward exploration, extraction, and refining.
- A $1.9bn IMF loan approved in July mostly services debt or adds foreign reserves rather than funding economic diversification, former economist Luis Fernando Romero notes.
- Indigenous Amazonian communities sustain bioeconomies built on Brazil nuts, açaí, and cacao — Bolivia exported £145m in Brazil nuts in 2024, double its timber sector — but mining and agroindustrial lobbies hold outsized power over a government that has sidelined environmental policy.
- Bolivia is projected to become a net fossil gas importer by about 2030, with gold exports reportedly worth £890m in 2025 (plus significant illegal trafficking) and agroindustry positioned as the country's next export frontier — a shift Arauz warns risks repeating the same commodity-dependence trap.
Why it matters: Bolivia's trajectory illustrates how hydrocarbon-rich nations can squander windfalls: $10bn in elite offshore holdings alongside 84% informal labour shows extraction profits left no domestic industrial base, and the roughly 2030 net-importer deadline forces a binary choice between another raw-commodity cycle (gold, soy, Brazil nuts) and structural transformation that entrenched mining and agroindustrial lobbies actively resist.
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