The Latin American Integrated Market, or MILA, which comprises the bourses of Chile, Colombia, Peru and Mexico, is working to include local institutional investments in the next 10 years, Colombia's finance minister said on Monday. Speaking at a panel of Pacific Alliance members in New York, Mauricio Cardenas, Colombia's Finance Minister, said deeper integration of capital markets is essential as foreign investment is seen declining and the region focuses on domestic impulse.
He said the alliance is looking beyond "a platform for issuing IPOs, trading stocks, trading fixed income instruments, but also that our local institutional investments can actually participate in the MILA markets without restrictions." The aim is that listing a security locally in any of the four countries will allow for its immediate promotion in any of the other three countries.
The plan would allow for Chilean pension funds to invest in securities in Peru, Colombia, Mexico. "There are a number of restrictions today that we need to change," Cardenas said. "This is the road and the mission for the next 10 years." Early this year, Mexican bourse officials said MILA planned to include debt instruments in 2016 and indexes for sectors such as mining and energy. MILA was formed in 2011 to boost market liquidity within the Pacific Alliance trade group. The tie-up aims to create more business for financial markets in the region. The Pacific Alliance, created in 2012, is an economic bloc that includes MILA's members and represents about 35 percent of Latin America's gross domestic product.