Industrial Policies in Colombia

This paper surveys and analyzes industrial policies in Colombia, finding extensive use of productive development policies (PDPs) and despite claims of only moderate government intervention. Rarely explicitly associated with the need to address market failures, PDPs are instead associated with economic reactivation and vaguely defined competitiveness. There are also PDPs that address government failures considered unlikely to be corrected by first-best interventions. Colombia has made progress, however, in structuring an institutional setting for PDP design that is sufficiently linked with private sector groups to elicit information on constraints and opportunities that require government intervention. Nonetheless, the overall set of PDPs in place still lacks coherence and is not always guided by the policy requests of the private sector more widely defined

Innovation, Research and Development Investment and Productivity in Colombian Firms

This paper attempts to establish a formal relationship between innovation and productivity using Colombian firm-level data. It is found that the production of goods and services new to the firm and to the domestic market enhances firms` sales per worker, and innovation that results in introducing new goods and services to the international market boosts both sales and Total Factor Productivity (TFP). Innovation in processes likewise improves firms` productivity and sales. Finally, innovation in marketing and management increases sales per worker and enhances TFP when investment is made in Research and Development. The paper also studies the factors behind firms` decision to invest in innovation, the intensity of such investment and the returns to investment in innovation