Abstract
After a long period of stagnation during the Belle-Époque (1870–1914), Colombia finally experienced an economic take-off early in the twentieth century. The fundamental question in this chapter is: what was the reason behind Colombia’s economic take-off late in the decade of the 1910s, and its consolidation in the 1920s?
Colombia’s economic take-off was export-driven or, more accurately, a coffee-driven one. That was a result of Colombia resuming its access to the international capital market, which allowed it to build up a precarious, but workable, transport infrastructure in the 1910s. Such an infrastructure expanded and consolidated in the 1920s, and Colombia could for the first time integrate the farming areas of the inlands with the ports on the coast in a way that incorporated steam technology.
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Notes
- 1.
Series are presented in logarithms in order to reduce their volatility and to make it easier to track long-term trends.
- 2.
Estimation based on data presented by Pachon and Ramirez (2006, pp. 85–87).
- 3.
The Santa Marta railway transported the 26.6% of total freight in 1910 and 15.1% in 1919 (Anuarios estadísticos, Departamento de Contraloría).
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Luzardo-Luna, I. (2019). The Take-off, 1914–1929: Coffee, Railways, and Regional Divergence. In: Colombia’s Slow Economic Growth. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25755-2_3
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