Inside the Mind of a Reformer

Ideas Untrapped

Manuel Hinds shared his experience reforming El Salvador's economy post-civil war, highlighting the importance of stabilising the fiscal situation, reducing tariffs, and privatising inefficient public companies to introduce competition. He emphasised the necessity of cutting the central bank's direct financing to the government to curb inflation. He suggested that investing in human capital and education is crucial for long-term economic growth. Hinds also discussed the need for practical and disciplined policy implementation, cautioning against reliance on populist promises and advocating for a pragmatic, reality-based approach to economic management.

Manuel Hinds has served as minister of the economy (in 1979) and of finance (in 1995-1999) in El Salvador, as division chief at the World Bank (in the 1980s and early 1990s), working with more than thirty countries, and as the Whitney H. Shepardson fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (in 2004-2005).

Transcript

Tobi:

Let me get a little background into your period during the reform in El Salvador. I know you spearheaded the reform of the economy, the currency regime, and a lot of things. What was the situation like when you came into the picture? What were the problems, and how did you approach it, especially on the political economy side, you know, getting the buy-in of the elites or entrenched interests who might be opposed to the reforms?

Manuel:

El Salvador, when I came into the picture, I came into the picture in two stages. First, I was working with the World Bank, and then I went back to El Salvador and started as a consultant to the board of directors of the Central Bank. It was just one meeting a week, and that was it. Later, I came in as the Minister of Finance.

The situation was this: El Salvador had been in a civil war. We are a small country, 6 million inhabitants, but the civil war was very bloody. We had 80,000 deaths and the country was, for 10 years, in this terrible division. But then, you know, the people became tired of the war and all the population made it clear that they wanted peace. And then with the help of several friendly countries and the United Nations, we had a peace accord in which there was no winner in the war; the winner was the people. We reformed the constitution and we had free elections. And then, the country started on the right foot, i’d say, because everybody in the different political parties were willing to go the extra mile so that things could be done very well.

In El Salvador, the period of the president is five years. I came in the second, after the peace accords. The peace accords were in 1992 and I came to the government in 1995, January 1995. El Salvador was very similar to many Latin American countries, and actually many African countries as well. We had a lot of protection. The protective tariffs went up to 100 and something. We had Central American common market, but that was a very small market still. And also we had a problem with the pensions. We were accumulating a lot of liabilities for the government without enough income. And also we had very ineffective public companies.

So when I came in, the president invited me to give him a presentation of what I thought we should do. And when I made the presentation, he said, "Well, I'm prepared to do this, but if you are the minister of finance." So he put me in a corner, you know, and then I said, OK, I'm going to do it.

And then we started with number one: we had to stabilise the country, which meant that we have to stabilise fiscally the country because we have been spending a lot, particularly, but not only, in the war, the war effort. So when I came in, I had the advantage that we could reduce substantially expenditures just by reducing the army. So the first one was we were up because the inflation at the time was something like 28%. It was between 20 and 30%. It had started to go down in the first period after the war. So when I came in, inflation was probably 20 to 25%.

Also we had very high import tariffs. We had the problem of the pensions. And also this was a time when the communications were starting to have a revolution. This was 1994. So you could already see that this new technological revolution was really connected with communications. And we still didn't have internet. We still didn't have good communications. So we had to do something about it. And also we had very expensive electricity. So I made proposals for each of these things.

In the case of inflation, the problem that we had was that the government had very high deficits and then the central bank would finance them. Because the inflation rate was high, then the interest rates were extremely high. The rates of interest were something on the order of 20 to 25 percent. Since the people didn't trust the currency, it was almost impossible to get mortgages from the banking system and long-term credit for investment. So the government had to spend a lot on subsidies and providing money so that the banks use that money to finance long-term.

When I came in, I was telling you that the inflation was coming down and two years after I was there, inflation was 2%. 2 or 3 percent. So inflation was not the problem, but the rate of interest remained very high, 20 percent. The problem was that people said, "Well, these people, they are not going to devalue the currency, but the next government may devalue the currency because this was what many people in Latin America were doing at the time." So I propose to dollarise, I propose to reduce the tariffs, the import tariffs, also the reform of the pensions, which rather than having a pay-as-you-go, we will have individual accounts and people will save for their own pension in an account under their name. And also the privatization of electricity and communications, the telephone company. But we propose to privatize under competition. You are very young, probably, you never lived in that time when electricity and communications were natural monopolies. And everybody said, "Well, it's impossible to have competition in these sectors because the investments are too high. And if everybody invests in telephone lines, then it will be a waste."

But we said, "No, we are going to introduce competition in the market" because already there were ways in which we could have competition, even with the landlines. But also the mobile telephones were coming. So we issued a law of competition in those sectors. And we privatized these companies in two or three companies, different companies. And also we opened for anybody who could get into these businesses. Mainly in communications, very fast, we had something like 40 different companies with cellular phones. We had this system in which company A could use the lines of company B paying at all. And we did the same with electricity. So this was a success.

Also, the pension funds were created and they started saving a lot and we reduced the protection. This was the most difficult of all the things, because the companies become used to being protected and they don't want international competition. So it became a political problem, really, and we were afraid that we wouldn't be able to pass the new law through the National Assembly. And then the president told me, maybe we are doing too many things. Let's choose three or four and we concentrate on that. And of course, the reduction of protection has to be one of them. We had to increase the value of the tax because we were going to reduce protection and we were going to reduce the income of the government and we were going to need some more revenues and then we increase…and that was also a difficult thing to pass.

Then we dropped dollarisation and all the other things we finished, what we had proposed. Then dollarisation was done by the next government. The country dollarized in 2001. I was no longer the Minister of Finance, but the new president called me just to do that. So I worked with the government just to do the dollarisation with the new government. Dollarisation is not the only way in which you can stabilise or reduce interest rates, but it's a very cheap way of doing it. And it has worked very well. Many people said, if you dollarise, in the first world crisis, you will go out. Because you won't be able to have a monetary policy to survive. And then, you know, in 2008, we had the world crisis. And then in 2020, we had COVID. And actually, El Salvador fared extremely well, better than all our neighbours, because the market controls the supply of money very efficiently.

In 2008, a Marxist government came on board, and they didn't like the dollar for obvious reasons. They asked the IMF to make an assessment of dollarisation. And the IMF made the assessment and they said, well, El Salvador has reduced a dead weight in the economy, which is the currency risk. If you eliminate the currency risk, you can win easily 1% of GDP. So it's a very cheap way of doing it and you reduce the working load on the government because El Salvador doesn't need to worry about the exchange rate or about inflation. It comes automatically, the market does it, so it's very good.

I remember I mentioned this in my plan, but this has not been done in El Salvador. Already in that time, 1994, the world was coming into the knowledge economy. It wasn’t really clear, but now it's crystal clear. The new economy in the world is organized around knowledge. And you can see that in everything. When I was talking about this in 1992, 93, 94, the world's most powerful companies were industrial companies. They have chimneys, they got tremendous industrial production, they produce cars or electric equipment and so on. The largest was General Motors, and they were very noisy companies. Now the largest companies in the world look like universities. It's Apple, for example. Microsoft. All these companies, they produce nothing but knowledge. That's the only thing that they produce, because Apple, they don't produce anything physical. They subcontract that. They outsource the production of the computers and other things. They only produce software, designs, and that's where the big value added is.

So like the industrial revolution, when you have a technological revolution that is very good for us the developing countries, because you can jump without having to go through all the things that you needed to be industrial. Of course it is not easy, you have to invest a lot, but rather than investing in many things, you have to invest in your own people.

When I grew up, people said to have education and health and housing is the social sectors. But before having the social problems we need to produce and we are going to produce this with companies, manufacturing cars and planes or whatever. And then when we become rich, then we are going to spend money on health, education, and housing, and really, now it’s the other way around. Because if you don't have educated people, you cannot grow. What are the countries or the regions that are growing faster in the world? Well, you have Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley, they have Stanford University right there. And also they have many other, San Jose State University, Berkeley, and so on and that feeds these companies with the inputs they need. And the input they need is people, good engineers, good scientists. If I could tell you one thing only, I can say invest in your own people. Invest in education, invest in health, because that will allow them to become more productive and then the country will become rich.

Tobi;

There's so much packed into your answer that I'll have to untangle them one by one, because I feel you are uniquely positioned to untangle some of the questions that I have. You’ve been a researcher, you've been a foreign expert with your work with the World Bank, you've been a senior cabinet member and reformer in your own country, El Salvador. So I would like to start with inflation, right? In my own observation, poor countries in the context of the macro economy stumble periodically and struggle with three crises, which for me are inflation, exchange rates, and debt.

To start with inflation, for example, in Nigeria, we also have double-digit inflation. It's 33% now, food inflation is 40%. It's causing a cost-of-living crisis in the country. And the government through the central bank is struggling to bring this under control, which we have been doing for the past eight, nine years, right? But what I want to ask you is that to the degree that you can generalise from your own direct experience and knowledge, what are the common causes of inflation in poor countries?

And I ask this because there is a lot of mischievous debates when you're trying to talk about inflation, particularly determining whether it is a monetary phenomenon or a non-monetary phenomenon. I feel like people who are addicted or amenable to government spending will tell you, "Oh, it's non-monetary and that Milton Friedman was wrong." And they paint the other side as neoliberal, orthodoxy, textbook economics. So I would like you to help me tease out what are the nuances in the inflation phenomenon in low-income countries.

Manuel;

Yes, well, we can go from the more general to the particular, maybe. Because the problem that you mentioned is the basis of underdevelopment and this is something that Africa shares with Latin America. Do you remember this guy called Sisyphus? Sisyphus was this guy who did something that the gods didn't like, and then they condemned him to push a boulder up a hill. And when he reached the top of the hill, the boulder would come down to the valley again, and then he had to go back and push it back up. And if you look in Latin America and also in Asia, from time to time, you had a good government who come here and stabilise the economy, stabilise the country, the interest rates go down and then you think now we are going in the real path of progress. And then suddenly there is a new populist that comes in and starts promising lots of things to the people. And then they borrow money to spend a lot in the government in things that are not really developmental. And then after a few years, the country is again in the same situation.

Tobi;

Precisely.

Manuel;

In Latin America, you could see the worst case, this happens all over Latin America. But the most dramatic case is Argentina. Argentina in the early 20th century was the seventh richest country in the world. They were very, very, very rich. Because of this thing that they started having high inflation because of populism. You know, people coming, the politicians come and they promise things and get elected, and then they waste the money, and then you start having problems of the problem that you have in Nigeria. Nigeria, compared with Argentina, is moderate. The inflation rate in Nigeria is 40[%], you told me. In Argentina today, it's 300[%].

Tobi;

Yeah. True.

Manuel;

And then because of these things, because of this continuous… this Sisyphus thing, they stabilise, then they destabilise and so on. Argentina now is number 66. Rather than being seventh, now it's the 66th. Because they have spent a century just trying to stabilise the economy.

I think that at the very end, if you analyse the problem, people have the governments they deserve. If they elect populist people, then you have destabilisation. You have there [in Nigeria] a problem of education, exactly like in Latin America, but it is a certain kind of education for that problem. The education is the self-assurance that you can do it without needing a miracle and then “we are going to work hard for one generation. The developed countries, they work for one generation or two generations and we are going to really build a new country.” And the other one is, “no, there is this guy who says he is going to solve all the problems and that this will make us rich.” You know that Latin America has 200 years of independence, 200 years. And in 200 years, we are back in the same position, relative position to Europe that we had in the early 19th century. And Argentina went from rich to poor and Latin America remained poor.

This is an education in common sense, okay? People have to come to the realization that miracles do not happen. That even when they tell you, “well, there is the Japanese miracle,” but that's because the Japanese had educated the population a lot before. And the same in Korea. So what we have to do is we have to invest in the people like Singapore. Singapore was much poorer than Nigeria. It was much poorer than El Salvador also. But they invested in education, in common sense, in saying, OK, we are going to work and then we will become rich. And we are not going to expect a miracle, because expecting miracles, you see what has happened. We are in the same position as 200 years ago.

The question is, why is [it] that countries create so much money? They create so much money because they want to spend, they want to go into very big fiscal deficits and to pay for them, they print money. - MH

So that's the first problem that you mentioned. And that is the basic problem, Tobi, I think that if you solve that one, then you will start seeing solutions for the other things. Because people themselves will find the solutions to the other problems. The other problem is, is inflation a monetary problem or is it a fiscal problem? I think it all depends on what is the angle that you are looking at. I think that inflation is definitely a monetary problem. The question is, why is [it] that countries create so much money? They create so much money because they want to spend, they want to go into very big fiscal deficits and to pay for them, they print money.

In El Salvador, many people believe that we reduce inflation because we dollarised. And that's not true. Inflation came down because we forbade the central bank to finance anybody. A new law for the central bank said the central bank cannot lend to the government ever. Period. And it cannot lend to the banks except in the case of financial crisis. Only in those circumstances. And then the inflation went down, the inflation went down from 20 something, almost 30 percent to 2 percent within three years or something like that (three or four years). But of course, you need the discipline to really not lend into the government. So I was the minister of finance and I could not borrow money from the central bank. So the only possibility I had to do that was to reduce the deficit and also borrow money abroad. And of course, when you borrow money abroad, you are subject to a certain discipline, you know, because you have to convince other people. When you want to finance the government just with the central bank, then the minister of finance just takes the phone and calls the president of the central bank and [says] sell me so much billion. But when you have to go to the international markets or to the World Bank, or to the African Development Bank, you have to justify why you need the money, how you are going to pay, and so on. That introduces discipline to the government. So I think it's very important to separate the monetary and the fiscal, so that you cannot use the authority of the government to force the central bank to give you money. And you can attain that in two ways. One is to have a strong law and applying the law. Or you just outsource the supply of money to the government of the United States, to the Federal Reserve, in the case of dollarisation. Or you could adopt the Euro. But the point is, cut that link. It's like a drug addict. The solution is not to give them drugs, period. That’s it!

Tobi;

That's so deep and apt because, again, with the Nigeria example, we had eight years of unrestricted monetary finance by the central bank, more or less just printing money and borrowing the government to the extent that the existing law, which places a cap on how much monetary financing can be done, was broken several times. Which leads me to my next question to you is that, so you can pass a law, but how does the subject of central bank independence and the politics of it play in here? Because laws can be broken if the political leadership is highly motivated to do so.

Manuel;

The thing is, I am 78 years old. I have worked as an economist for, I don't know, 50 years. And I can tell you, if there is one lesson, there is no perfect system. There is no automatic system. It's people. If you buy a car, and it could be maybe a Ford, you buy a Ford, which is not very expensive, a small Ford. And then you give maintenance to this car and you take care of it, you don't drive it in dangerous circumstances and so on. That car could last for decades. But you can buy a Rolls Royce, and if you go and you crash it ten times, you drive it on the beach and then you go into the ocean with it and the saline water comes in and so on. You will destroy the Rolls-Royce. And it is not because the Rolls-Royce is a bad car, it's because you are abusing the car. And that is what happens. You can have a good central bank and a good government in which you establish a rule, as we had in El Salvador. We had a law saying the government cannot lend money to the government. And we met that, you know. We met that condition. It would never again happen. We were one of the worst risks in Latin America, even if we never defaulted. El Salvador is one of the few developing countries which has never defaulted. But we had a very bad risk ranking. Five years after the war, we became investment-grade. So we could borrow at very low interest rates and so on because we were meeting the conditions we ourselves had established and people respected us. But now, 30 years later, inflation is very low because we are dollarised and the rates of interest for the private sector are very low. But for the government it's 16% because they have been borrowing like crazy in the international markets. And it is because the new government, it's the Sisyphus story, they found that the country had a very good possibility of borrowing money and they borrow and borrow and borrow and they are compromising the stability of the country.

So that's why we go full circle. If we vote into power a populist government which will spend money like crazy, then we will go back. There's no other way. So I think that what you do, for example, is a very good thing. You have your podcast, you are instructing the people so that they can learn. In Latin America, we have a literary style called magic realism. You are familiar with that or not?

Tobi;

Yes.

Manuel;

Yes, magic realism. And then we have been infected with magic realism in economics, which is that you think that you can float in the air, that you can levitate and so on. People have to understand you cannot levitate, you cannot borrow because you will have to pay for this money.

But now I don't know, Tobi, what is happening in the world, because look at the United States, uh?

Tobi;

Yeah, it’s crazy.

Manuel;

They are going down the drain. The same as Nigeria, the same as El Salvador. It's incredible. It's really incredible. I think that at some moment we have to hit rock bottom and say, no, no, no. We have to start over and start seriously and so on.

Tobi;

I hope so.

Let me talk to you a bit about exchange rates. Another thing that poorer countries or low-income countries or what we call developing countries struggle with is this exchange rate problem. In Nigeria, for example, the source, the main source of foreign exchange, which is oil, has collapsed due to incredible corruption, lack of productivity and investment in that sector, years of neglect. The law that was supposed to reform the governance of the sector was held in the parliamentary system for almost 20 years, and the version that got eventually passed was an inefficient one, evidently.

Now, poor countries run into this exchange rate crisis when they run out of dollars, basically, and what you hear is that, oh, you need to diversify your economy in order to bring in more dollars, you need to export more because then you start rationing, the system becomes corrupt, you introduce a peg, suddenly the black market in currency becomes thriving. What are the common sensical ways to manage currency risks? I would emphasise that besides dollarisation, I'm a big fan of the dollarisation idea, but it's just that, for example, in Nigeria, it will be almost like a non-starter. For example, we have a law, I know laws can be changed, but the constitution of Nigeria bans any other currency being used for transactions besides the Naira. Even though that is the law, but in reality, people do transactions in dollars and different currencies all the time because the local currency itself can be so volatile and unreliable as a store of value. So besides dollarisation, how can poor countries manage currency risks? Like in the mood of this conversation, what are the common sense insights that we are missing?

Manuel;

You can do what we did, because we dollarised after stabilising the country. When the inflation was already 2%, then we dollarised. One thing was not the consequence of the other. It was that we dollarised to reduce the interest rates, to reduce the risk. But then a new government came into power when the war was still going. And then with an economy in war, the central bank had done exactly the same things that you are talking [about]. They control the exchange rate. They had strict exchange controls. If you were an exporter, you had to deliver all the dollars to the central bank. If you were an importer, you needed a special license to import. Then there was this black market, and there was incredible corruption. Everything that you described to me, that was happening in El Salvador. So this government, the first thing they did was to say, "We are eliminating all the exchange rate controls." Flatly. That if you want dollars, buy dollars. If you want to take your dollars out of the country, take them out of the country. We are not going to intervene. This goes to the private sector. And then you know what happened? Before that, the money was leaving the country. Whenever you had an opportunity, you took the money out. When the government said, "You want to take it? Take it out." And then money started coming in.

Tobi, it is like I invite you to two parties. In one party, you go there and you can leave whenever you want. And in that one, you can bring your own whiskey. And in the other one, you can come in, but you cannot leave. Once you enter into the party, you cannot leave the party. Which of the two will you go to? If you tell the people you cannot take your money out, people will not bring their money in. We proved that in El Salvador. And there was a war, Tobi. So the problem of the scarcity of dollars stopped just by saying, "If you want to bring dollars, bring them. If you want to take them out, take them out." And then, in net terms, the dollars started coming in. Because people say, "If I'm going to invest, I will try, I will bring dollars. And if I want to take the money out, I can take the money out. And if I want to have interest rates paid abroad or whatever, I will be able to do that." So the first thing, I would liberate the market. And the second one is the other rule I gave you, because we reduce inflation without dollarisation. What we did was we forbade the central bank to lend money to the government. Period. And we complied with the law. That was it.

Because, for example, Argentina has done things like this, but they don't comply with the law. It's the same as not having a law. It is worse. It is actually worse because then you are destroying the rule of law. So it's very simple. For me, the political economy of development is very complex, it's very interesting. It has to do with education. It has to do with opening ways to the world but keeping the economy stable with the inflation rate low and without problems getting dollars is very simple. You don't need an economist for that. Anybody can do it. You call a driver and say, "The only thing that you are going to do is not allowing the central bank to lend money to the government." Period. And then if he does that, he could be a barber, he could be a dancer or whatever, and he will stabilise the country.

Tobi;

Still about reforms, and it goes back to your first answer, which is that as a policymaker, you have to make some very hard decisions, some tough decisions. Reform packages have to be sequenced and well coordinated. So how do you make the trade-offs if you are trying to stabilize a country and get it out of an economic crisis and facing all these problems like you did in El Salvador, a currency crisis, high interest rates, high inflation, high fiscal deficits. What are the quick wins, the first two, three things that you can do?

Manuel;

That's a good question because you say, what are the first ones? Because it's a process. What I would advise, go for the low-hanging fruit, the things that are easier to do. Because if you succeed in doing that, then people will trust you and then you will be able to do the more difficult ones. So in that sense, I think that the simplest thing, simplest, I'm not saying easiest, will be to stabilise the economy. Because it's a simple thing to do. But then look at what is happening in Argentina. You have to do it in a way that you don't destroy the country while stabilising the economy. Because if you just stop printing money or just reduce the fiscal deficit to zero and then it happens that you cut education expenses or you cut the money for the hospitals, as it is happening in Argentina, then you are killing yourself. You are taking a medicine that will kill you in the long run. So what you have to do, I think, is to structure a very good plan so that you can reduce printing money but you don't have to cut all the expenditures immediately. You can go down in expenditures choosing not the most important things. But also you mentioned corruption, there is a lot of money that goes with corruption. So give yourself time, let's say, two or three years to reduce the expenditures in a way that will not reduce the rate of growth of the GDP by reducing corruption, by improving the efficiency of government expenditures. I'm sure that you can probably cut your budget by 50% without really affecting the growth of the country because the resources are being wasted, because there is corruption, and these kinds of things. But you cannot do that in one go because you have to understand how the government is working and then you reduce the waste. So you need some financing during those two or three years and then borrow. Borrow abroad. Borrow abroad, not inside the country. Do not create currency. And then you are going to get money to do that if you present a very good plan. If you show that you have done your homework and then you have calculated how you are going to reduce the expenditures and so on, then you can do it. And I think that is the first thing. Also, you can easily liberalise the exchange rate and the foreign exchange markets. You say, "Well, the central bank is not going to intervene." The price of the currency will be set by the market and you can take the money out if you want. Do it. The currency will not go out. It will come in. You will see.

Tobi;

You talked about having a good plan and one that reflects having done your homework. Which then brings me to my next question. Earlier, you talked about investing in people and human capital generally. And sometimes I do wonder about the human capital in government itself, even at the most senior level. So I would ask you, what are the qualities, intellectual and psychological qualities, that make a good policymaker?

Manuel;

You know, I could bet, Tobi, that you have good people in Nigeria.

Tobi;

Of course.

Manuel;

The thing is how you are going to identify them and get them. But I agree with you that it is fundamental to bring the best people to work in the government, best people in terms of education, in terms of common sense, and in terms of being honest, not corrupt. I'm sure, because for all the waste and for everything that happens, I'm sure that you have very good engineers, oil engineers. You have very good... it's a big country. You must have good people and then bring those people to the government because you don't need to change everybody. You have to change the key people, the people who are going to manage the government, the big policies and so on. And then they will introduce discipline in their own ministries and state-owned companies and so on. You don’t have to change everybody. I'm sure there are many people there who are very good engineers, but they are not producing because the bosses are corrupt or something like that. People have to understand that you cannot arrange all this in one go. The important thing is to start growing consistently, like Singapore.

Tobi;

There's so much I would have loved to talk to you [about], but maybe sometimes we'll find some time particularly on sovereignty and globalisation and your excellent book with Benn Steil. But before I let you go, a couple of quickfire questions. Economics, the field of economics, is getting a bad rap everywhere these days. What has your own experience as an economist, especially in areas of policymaking and the influence of economics on policy generally, what has your own experience been? What are the good and the bad of the influence of economics and policy? And also relatedly, did your earlier education and career as an industrial engineer make you a better economist in any way?

Manuel;

Yes, well, of course, economic theory is very important. It's basic. But the most important thing is to be pragmatic. I am an economist and I am an industrial engineer. Engineering puts you in close touch with reality. If you are going to be a good economist, I think in one way or another, it could be engineering, it could be some other thing, but you have to keep yourself close to reality. That's number one. And number two, never believe that you know everything. Because, for example, I worked with the Soviet Union. I remember many people from the West were coming to the Soviet Union to give advice. And before they left Washington, they knew what they were going to tell the Russians, before knowing Russia. I always found that absurd. You have to approach your work with humility, you know, because normally, what I have found is people themselves give you the solutions. If you know how to ask questions, if you explain these things, if you work with them, then you will find solutions that are workable. You don't want to have economists that come here from any other country to apply the solutions they have applied over there, just like that. Because every government, every country has a difference. You have your own nature, the way things work. And then there are things that you do better than your neighbours also. So if you really know a country, you can produce much better solutions.

Tobi;

Final question. And again, this is a bit of a tradition on the podcast. What's the one idea that you would like to see spread everywhere? It may be your idea. It may be from someone else. It may be from something you've read. But what is that one idea that you would like to see spread everywhere, have a lot of influence, and get people excited?

Manuel;

The best thing that you can do is invest in your own people. Invest in their education, their health, because human capital is not the product of growth. Growth is the product of human capital. The thing that you have to do is educate your people.

Tobi;

Thank you very much, Manuel.

Manuel;

It's been a pleasure.

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