Regional Structural Changes in Colombia: An Input-Output Approach
The series Working Papers on Economics is published by the Office for Economic Studies at the Banco de la República (Central Bank of Colombia). The works published are provisional, and their authors are fully responsible for the opinions expressed in them, as well as for possible mistakes. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Banco de la República or its Board of Directors.
No previous work has focused on the analysis of the regional and interregional structure and structural changes in Colombia. An initial exploration using a parsimonious approach to the measurement of interregional interaction suggested a country with limited spatial interdependency. These findings were evaluated by taking advantage of a newly constructed interregional input-output model to measure the interactions within and between the Colombian regions. The direct and indirect production linkages effects are captured through the evaluation of the Leontief inverse matrices. The results suggest that key sectors have moved from primary and secondary sectors to tertiary sectors, which is a movement observed in the economic development process. However, it can be argued that the regional economies do not have exactly the same linkage structures. These differences are the result of discrepancies in the dominant sectors in each economy. The interregional linkages reveal a country with self-sufficient sectors in most of the regions, which supports the idea of a country with relatively poor interregional dependences, results that were also found in previous studies. The fact that the powerful backward and forward linkages are identified in the most prosperous regions instead of the lagged ones implies that the regional inequalities are likely tube sustained.
La serie Borradores de Economía es una publicación de la Subgerencia de Estudios Económicos del Banco de la República. Los trabajos son de carácter provisional, las opiniones y posibles errores son responsabilidad exclusiva del autor y sus contenidos no comprometen al Banco de la República ni a su Junta Directiva.
