Regional Structural Changes in Colombia: An Input-Output Approach

No previous work has focused on the analysis of the regional and interregional structure and structural changes in Colombia. An initial exploration using a parsimonious approach to the measurement of interregional interaction suggested a country with limited spatial interdependency. These findings were evaluated by taking advantage of a newly constructed interregional input-output model to measure the interactions within and between the Colombian regions. The direct and indirect production linkages effects are captured through the evaluation of the Leontief inverse matrices. The results suggest that key sectors have moved from primary and secondary sectors to tertiary sectors, which is a movement observed in the economic development process. However, it can be argued that the regional economies do not have exactly the same linkage structures. These differences are the result of discrepancies in the dominant sectors in each economy. The interregional linkages reveal a country with self-sufficient sectors in most of the regions, which supports the idea of a country with relatively poor interregional dependences, results that were also found in previous studies. The fact that the powerful backward and forward linkages are identified in the most prosperous regions instead of the lagged ones implies that the regional inequalities are likely to be sustained.