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COUNTRY INSIGHTS

JEP-XIT
COLOMBIA · Report · 01 Apr 2019

President Iván Duque’s objection to six articles of the Special Peace Jurisdiction (JEP) Act has created a Brexit moment for Colombia. Duque had two alternatives: first, even if he disliked the peace agreement, he could have accepted it, and have tried to impose the rule of law. This would have “...

Fiscal moves require some clarity
COLOMBIA · Report · 01 Mar 2019 · 1 response

The three themes dominating politics are President Iván Duque’s recovered popularity, Colombia’s role in the Venezuelan debacle and the future of the FARC-related Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). Duque’s approval ratings have benefited from his recent moves pleasing the uribista right, namel...

Terror 102
COLOMBIA · Report · 01 Feb 2019

As the New Year begins, our assessment of the Colombian economy is mixed. Economic activity continues to pick up, consumer sentiment is recovering and, while inflation and monetary policy face some challenges, they’re nothing out of the ordinary. But there will be serious fiscal issues, both for ...

The Colombian quilting bee
COLOMBIA · Report · 21 Dec 2018

​According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a quilting bee is “a social gathering of women at which they work together at making quilts or doing other quilted work”. If the word “women” is replaced by “members of Congress”, we get a pretty good description of what happened with the tax reform (...

“Our proposal has been misunderstood”
COLOMBIA · Report · 13 Dec 2018 · 1 response

President Iván Duque recently gave an interview to a Cali radio station as part of an effort to counter the negative (to put it mildly) press coverage that both student protests and his tax reform proposal have attracted. The president contended that his tax plan had been “misunderstood.” Indeed,...

A new census portrays a very different country
COLOMBIA · Report · 14 Nov 2018

Preliminary 2018 census results delivered many surprises, most posing severe challenges for future economic and social policies. First, there are 45.5 million people living in Colombia, not the 50 million many had been projecting for years. Among major public policy implications: we are richer th...

Macroeconomic Outlook
COLOMBIA · Presentation · 26 Oct 2018

Challenges for the new administration include the fate of the tax reform, the aftermath of the peace plan, and a strategy for Venezuelan refugees into the country. Specifics topics in this Colombia presentation are: • Possible content of financing law, according to the director of DIAN and our ...

A vote on Finance Minister Carrasquilla in Congress?
COLOMBIA · In Brief · 24 Oct 2018 · 1 response

An eventual no-confidence vote (moción de censura) against Finance Minister Alberto Carrasquilla would be an unwelcome event. Some congressmen would like to exploit this as an opportunity to force the Duque administration to negotiate. We think that the prospect of the government’s losing its mos...

Is it or is it not a Tax Reform?
COLOMBIA · Report · 01 Oct 2018 · 1 response

It was common knowledge that the proposed budget submitted by the outgoing Juan Manuel Santos administration featured a drastic cut in public investment, to lower the central government deficit from 3.1% of GDP this year to the mandated 2.4% of GDP in 2019. This would require either budget cuts o...

Swallowing frogs
COLOMBIA · Report · 04 Sep 2018 · 1 response

A new concept is taking shape in Colombia: a president without a congressional majority. Though we’ve yet to see how such an arrangement could work in Colombia, the experiences of neighboring governments, like Vicente Fox’s in Mexico and Pedro Pablo Kuzcynski’s in Peru, are not encouraging. C...

Turmoil
COLOMBIA · Report · 27 Jul 2018 · 1 response

President-elect Iván Duque, just a few days from taking office, is already seeing new challenges piling up, which means everyone is looking to his first days, to ascertain his style. But some economic and fiscal challenges will loom, no matter what kind of president Duque turns out to be. The ...

Duque makes the right decision in appointing Carrasquilla as Minister of Finance
COLOMBIA · In Brief · 11 Jul 2018

President-elect Iván Duque has just announced that Alberto Carrasquilla is officially his pick for Minister of Finance. Carrasquilla, a 59-year old economist with ample experience in the Central Bank and Minister of Finance between 2003 and 2007 during the Uribe administration is, without a doubt...

The Duke, the King and Huck Finn
COLOMBIA · Report · 09 Jul 2018

In the one thousand miles trip down the Mississippi river, Huckleberry Finn met two funny characters who went by the nobility titles of the king and the duke. They were actors interpreting a show in the towns across the river, and forced Huck to play along, and to dispense them with royalty etiqu...

The fiscal playing field for the Duque administration
COLOMBIA · Report · 05 Jul 2018

As the Santos administration comes to an end, the Ministry of Finance submitted to Congress its last Medium-Term Fiscal Framework (MTFF) during the second week of June. President Iván Duque has announced fiscal policy will be on top of his four-year economic agenda, so we expect this MTFF to be m...

Paula and the cowboys
COLOMBIA · Report · 18 Jun 2018

Duque won Colombia’s presidency with 10.4 million votes (54% of total valid votes), while Petro obtained 8 million votes, equivalent to 41.8% (See Table 1). Figures 1 and 2 show the regional distribution indicating that some key provinces of central Colombia were responsible for these results. Du...

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