Colombia’s exports performance in non-fuel sectors

Resumen

Today Colombia’s growth is strongly dependent on its fuel and mining exports, despite substantial efforts to diversify its exports after its economic liberalization. This reliance on commodity exports casts doubt on the effectiveness of its export promotion policies. The aim of this descriptive study is to establish if Colombia’s policies during the period 1992 to 2001 nonetheless can be regarded as relatively successful. To this end, we use a comparative approach that contrasts the export performance of Colombia in eight non-fuel sectors with that of nine other middle-income countries from different regions. The idea behind this methodology is that an above average export performance in a specific sector indicates that the country’s export promotion policies in that sector were relatively successful, whereas the opposite is the case if the country’s performance was below average. The obtained results show that Colombia was among the weakest performers, both in terms of export growth and with regard to export to GDP ratios, in all but one of the eight sectors under study. The only sample country that consistently underperformed Colombia was Venezuela. An additional noteworthy finding is that Colombian exports in most non-fuel sectors did not recover as quickly from the global recession of 2009 as those from other countries. This is especially true for manufactured goods, and machinery and transport equipment. These findings indicate that Colombia should rethink its current export promotion policies.