Bolivia’s new president is planning major reforms to unleash a mining and oil exploration boom, burying nearly 20 years of socialism in the Andean nation with a new policy — “capitalism for all”.

Rodrigo Paz, a pragmatic centrist former senator, said his team was working on a package of laws to boost foreign investment in natural resources that would be presented to congress for approval “in the coming days or months”.

“We need a new oil and gas law,” Paz told the Financial Times in an interview while attending an economic forum in Panama.

“Bolivia should go for 50-50 [risk-sharing with foreign investors]. I give you the space. You come in with technology and investment . . . I think it’s the basis for business in future.”

Bolivia has a fifth of the world’s reserves of lithium, according to the US Geological Survey, but with its state-owned company YLB lacking technical expertise and investment, it has struggled for years to produce commercial quantities of the battery metal and exports are currently dominated by neighbouring Chile.

Bolivia also has big reserves of silver, tin and antimony. Paz said the Bolivian people, who have a history of protesting against mining, would support fresh investment if they were shown they would benefit financially. He compared his country to its neighbours: “Peru last year had mining revenues of around $50bn. Chile had revenues with state and private companies of $65bn. And we . . . had just $6bn,” he said.

Here is more from Michael Stott at the FT.  We will see, as they say.  I am cautiously hopeful.