Déficit público y desempeño económico en la década del noventa. El caso colombiano

This paper reviews the fiscal policy effects on the economic activity in Colombia since 1990, through some standardized techniques which have been used in other countries (fiscal-impulse technique). As starting point, the Colombian fiscal data is homogenized in relation to their coverage and basis of recording of the public operations, due to some methodological changes introduced in the fiscal deficit accounting when the country signed the IMF agreement in 1999. We also estimate the most relevant concepts of the fiscal deficit (financial, primary, operational and structural deficit), some of them resulting more appropriate than others in order to quantify their effects on the rest of the economy. Our finding show that the recent imbalance on the public accounts is basically of structural nature. On average, just a 10% of the fiscal imbalance registered by the Non-Financial Public Sector during the last four years, is due to the poor performance of the economic activity. Additionally, according to different measures, the fiscal policy of the central government was highly pro-cyclical between 1994 and 1998, and counter-cyclical in 1999, 2000 and 2002, although the later period was less significant. In 1996, the highest expansion of the economy was due to the government operations (2.8% of the GDP), which was equivalent to the output-gap of that year. The most recent history indicates that only in 2001, a fiscal contraction was generated (near to 1% of the GDP). The exercises for the public sector as whole, confirms the policy trends of the central government, but these results have to be taken with caution, because the fiscal policy through the decentralized agencies is more restricted.