Con el ánimo de contribuir al diseño de mejores políticas públicas y de proveer elementos académicos a los debates públicos, la Escuela de Gobierno Alberto Lleras Camargo y el Centro de Estudios sobre Desarrollo Económico – CEDE - de la Facultad de Economía de la Universidad de los Andes, han decidido publicar periódicamente Notas de Política. El objetivo de las Notas de Política es presentar los resultados de nuestras investigaciones académicas en un lenguaje ágil y accesible a un amplio espectro de colombianos. Con ello, esperamos difundir el trabajo académico y estrechar los vínculos entre la comunidad universitaria, el sector público y el sector privado. 

Con el ánimo de contribuir al diseño de mejores políticas públicas y de proveer elementos académicos a los debates públicos, la Escuela de Gobierno Alberto Lleras Camargo y el Centro de Estudios sobre Desarrollo Económico – CEDE - de la Facultad de Economía de la Universidad de los Andes, han decidido publicar periódicamente Notas de Política. El objetivo de las Notas de Política es presentar los resultados de nuestras investigaciones académicas en un lenguaje ágil y accesible a un amplio espectro de colombianos. Con ello, esperamos difundir el trabajo académico y estrechar los vínculos entre la comunidad universitaria, el sector público y el sector privado.

Este documento contiene una serie de reflexiones sobre políticas de desarrollo del sector productivo en Colombia, que surgen de investigaciones de los autores, algunas de ellas en compañía de otros coautores. El documento, estructurado a manera de “postre de notas”, plantea reflexiones puntuales sobre diferentes temas relacionados con la política de desarrollo productivo en Colombia, centrales al debate actual.

Credit constraints and business performance: evidence from public lending in Colombia

Whether public lending to firms effectively eases credit constraints has been widely studied for very small businesses. The evidence documented for larger firms refers to lending that is significantly subsidized and targeted to these businesses, so the estimated positive effects may reflect poor allocation of public credit. This paper investigates the impact on its beneficiaries of a wide, untargeted and unsubsidized, lending program in Colombia. We use data on all non-micro manufacturing firms and all formal credit operations. After correcting for potential selection biases using econometric techniques, we find that Bancóldex loans increase firms’ employment, purchases of inputs, investment, and output for small (but non-micro) firms, while large firms experience increases in variable inputs, but not on investment. While both short-term and long-term Bancóldex loans are found to have positive impacts on output, input demand and employment, only long-term loans increase investment. Moreover, short-term loans have a larger impact on input demand than long-term loans. Our findings also indicate that Bancóldex’ beneficiaries end up with improved overall credit conditions after receiving Bancóldex credit: the amount of credit received goes up, the duration of the loans increases, and beneficiaries are able to establish credit relationships with more financial intermediaries. Though the interest rates go down, in this dimension the effect is small.

Previous work has documented a negative correlation between internal conflict and state capacity. We attempt to shed light on mechanisms that underlie this relationship, using data for Colombian municipalities. We rely on identifying heterogeneous effects of different types of violent events on state capacity, taking advantage of variability across municipalities in the prevalence of specific manifestations of conflict and their intensity. Our findings suggest that events making civilians feel targeted affect the state’s capacity to collect taxes, while those reflecting a stronger military capacity of illegal armies, in particular their large-scale attacks, affect the state’s capacity to provide public goods.

We re-examine the view that wars make strong states, taking advantage of panel data to address two of the most obvious endogeneity concerns that arise in this context: initial conditions and persistence of state capacity. Our main message is that, in modern times, there is no evidence that wars lead to strong states. In contrast to findings for earlier periods, our results show that external conflicts have displayed a negative correlation with traditional measures of state capacity in recent decades, which becomes insignificant after controlling for initial conditions and the persistence of state capacity. As in previous work, we find a negative capacity- internal conflict correlation, robust to controlling jointly for initial conditions and persistent effects.