Colombia in the Classical Era of ‘Inward-Looking Development’, 1930–74

Abstract

Modern economic development, which had started to take hold in Colombia with the expansion of the coffee sector at the beginning of the century, speeded up in the 1930s, when adjustment to external shocks generated by the Great Depression worked as a catalyst for the spread of the dynamics of the coffee sector to the rest of the economy. Thereafter, and until the oil crisis of 1973, the economy experienced continuous growth accompanied by sweeping changes in the production structure. These changes were backed by internal market integration and the active intervention of the government in economic affairs. As a result, Colombia went from being a rural, agricultural society to an urban, semi-industrialized one. Although the country followed general regional trends, it avoided some of the excesses of ‘inward-looking development’ in other Latin American nations, especially too much emphasis on import substitution and undue government interference in production activity. The development process only partially benefited the population, however. Social inequality, already considerable at the beginning of the period analysed here, increased, leading to an even less equitable society.

We would like to thank Enrique Cárdenas, Jorge Katz, Adolfo Meisel, Juan Carlos Ramirez, Rosemary Thorp and other participants in the seminars that took place in Oxford and Paipa — Colombia — for their comments on previous drafts of this material.