Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2663 actions· ✨ 89 recent

Decreto Supremo Nº 5503, signed 17 December 2025 by the Paz administration on its first business day in office, declares a national Economic, Financial, Energy and Social Emergency and enacts a 120-article comprehensive stabilization package. Headline measures: a 15-year fiscal and legal stability guarantee for "strategic" foreign investment in mining, hydrocarbons, energy, agro-industry, infrastructure and export-manufacturing; a fast-track 30-day investment-approval procedure; 0% import tariff on industrial machinery, equipment and key inputs through 2026; accelerated depreciation for 2026 fixed-asset acquisitions (excluding extractive mining and hydrocarbons); discretionary write-off of pre-October 2025 tax interest and penalties; and elimination of fuel subsidies (with a 6-month transition price freeze). The decree restructures Bolivia's investment-incentive architecture and signals a pivot from the Morales/Arce-era resource nationalism toward foreign-capital attraction — directly material for the Salar de Uyuni lithium pipeline (CBC, Uranium One, Citic Guoan tenders).

Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB), Bolivia's state lithium SOE, signed a USD 1.030bn services contract on 26 November 2024 with Hong Kong CBC Investment Ltd. (a CATL-CMOC-BRUNP consortium) to build and operate two direct-lithium-extraction (DLE) plants on the Salar de Uyuni — one rated at 10,000 t/yr and one at 25,000 t/yr lithium carbonate, for combined 35,000 t/yr nameplate capacity. Bolivia retains a 51% sovereign share through YLB; CBC supplies financing, EDL technology and offtake. The contract was transmitted to the Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional and the Chamber of Deputies' Plural Economy, Production and Industry Commission approved it by majority in mid-2025 (Bill No. 197/2024-2025); full plenary ratification remained pending as of May 2026, with a parallel Colcha K mixed-court suspension order on FPIC (free, prior and informed consent) grounds.

Bolivia's Ley N° 928, promulgated by President Evo Morales Ayma on 27 April 2017, creates Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) as a 100%-state-owned Empresa Pública Nacional Estratégica (National Strategic Public Enterprise) under the Ministry of Energy (Ministerio de Hidrocarburos y Energía), replacing the National Management of Evaporitic Resources (GNRE) that had operated under COMIBOL. YLB is granted exclusive end-to-end authority over Bolivia's entire evaporitic-resource value chain — from prospecting and extraction at the world's largest identified lithium deposits (Salar de Uyuni, Salar de Coipasa, Pastos Grandes) through industrialisation to commercialisation — with a full-vertical-integration mandate covering production and commercialisation of lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, lithium chloride, lithium sulfate, potassium chloride, potassium nitrate, potassium sulfate, and downstream battery products. The law simultaneously carves lithium and evaporitic resources out of COMIBOL's general mining remit (amending the 2014 Ley 535 de Minería y Metalurgia) and establishes YLB as the operating authority for every contract, joint-venture, and concession over those resources.