Colombia

In Colombia, municipalities subjected to the Spanish encomienda – a colonial system of forced indigenous labour – are wealthier and better governed today, in spite of the extractive institution imposed on them.

Drawing on the first comparable, country-level evidence base from Argentina, Colombia, Ghana, India, Mexico, and South Africa, the IEA documents significant variation in where and how women exit the academic economics pipeline. The findings suggest t...

Destroying illicit crops at the source is meant to weaken criminal economies and create space for development. Evidence from Colombia's aerial glyphosate programme tells a different story: eradication triggered income shocks that pulled children out ...

Cocaine moves through the same global trade networks as legal goods, with violence rising where criminal groups fight over ports and other chokepoints.

Under standard conditions in the Colombian coffee sector, the benefits of producing better coffee are not passed on to farmers, weakening their incentives to invest in higher-quality production. However, when a large international buyer required inte...

Using surnames, we show that colonial-era hierarchies continue to shape access to Colombia’s best schools and elite social networks, limiting intergenerational mobility through both education and marriage.

Internationally trained PhDs are often seen as a ‘brain drain’, but evidence from Colombia suggests that they act as crucial bridges – connecting local researchers to the global scientific community.

The end of guerrilla violence in Colombia reshaped the composition of healthcare workers in conflict-affected areas. Despite redistributing healthcare workers away from these areas, they maintained service quality, offering valuable insights for publ...

Evidence from Colombia shows that weather shocks induce a fragmentation of the farm-size distribution and exacerbate the prevalence of small farms in an economy, shedding light on how climate change might lower agricultural productivity in developing...