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Regional Convergence in Colombia in the Twenty-First Century

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The Colombian Economy and Its Regional Structural Challenges

Part of the book series: Advances in Spatial Science ((ADVSPATIAL))

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Abstract

The studies aiming to answer whether wealthier areas in Colombia are growing slower than poorer areas have yielded mixed results. This chapter updates such estimates of unconditional beta convergence of the GDP per capita for the first years of the twenty-first century, when substantial structural changes occurred. Furthermore, it decomposes the beta by sectoral changes throughout the period while estimating it with a moving starting year. A convergence analysis of additional social and economic indicators supplements this assessment. The results suggest an increasing, yet non-significant, beta, indicating that Colombia is moving from a subtle convergence to a more frequent period of divergence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    New departments are San Andrés and Providencia Islands, Caquetá, Putumayo, Amazonas, Guainía, Guaviare, and Vaupés. Except for San Andrés, they belong to the Amazon region. They receive this name because they were created by the Political Constitution of 1991.

  2. 2.

    Colombia is a unitary country made up of three levels of governments: nation, 33 departments, and 1100 municipalities. There are also some districts which are territories with mixed characteristics of departments and municipalities.

  3. 3.

    In the standard literature that decomposes productivity understood as the rate GDP/workers, the first component describes changes in labor productivity, and the second component is represented by changes in labor participation. Due to the absence of labor sectorial participation over time/department, we use this alternative approach, which can also approximate the total GDP per capita change. The aggregation of the estimated components of the decomposition closely recovers the aggregated beta estimates in our case.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Banco de la República, Cartagena, Colombia

    Karina Acosta & Jaime Bonet

Authors
  1. Karina Acosta
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  2. Jaime Bonet
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Correspondence to Karina Acosta .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Eduardo A. Haddad

  2. Centro de Estudios Económicos Regionales (CEER), Banco de la República, Cartagena, Colombia

    Jaime Bonet

  3. Regional Economics and Applications Laboratory, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Geoffrey J. D. Hewings

Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 4.15, Tables 4.3 and 4.4.

Fig. 4.15
A line graph of Sigma versus the years 2000 through 2020. The value of revenue decreases throughout, the value of G D P increases from 0.48 to 0.49, and the value of income ranges between 0.3 and 0.33 between 2012 and 2020. Values are estimated.

Sigma-convergence: standard-deviation by indicator

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Table 4.3 GDP per capita beta estimates (all departments)
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Table 4.4 Beta decomposition by sectors
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Acosta, K., Bonet, J. (2023). Regional Convergence in Colombia in the Twenty-First Century. In: Haddad, E.A., Bonet, J., Hewings, G.J.D. (eds) The Colombian Economy and Its Regional Structural Challenges. Advances in Spatial Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22653-3_4

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