Suchergebnisse

This study analyzes the institutions that shape public private collaboration for the design and implementation of productive development policies in Colombia. Colombia is an interesting case because productive development policies are increasingly designed, in principle, in the context of formal institutions and venues, with public-private collaboration being a pillar of that formal design. We focus on two specific cases: (1) the Private Council for Competitiveness and its role in the National System for Competitiveness; (2) the Colombian government¿s Productive Transformation Program. These case studies suggest that public private collaboration has contributed to the continuity of productive development policies across governments. Collaboration has also been behind particular achievements, such as helping overcome specific government failures, and helping develop private organizational capabilities. A central message of this document is thus that formal institutions to foster public private collaboration, such as the ones adopted in Colombia over the last few decades, have an important potential for advancing adequate productive development policies. However, public private collaboration for productive policies has by no means brought a development ¿miracle¿.

This paper describes private actors' involvement in Colombia's policymaking process. While more transparent and formal channels are used to discuss horizontal policies, they are also less effective. The adoption of targeted policies, however, follows a faster track and depends more on political power than on those policies' potential as engines for productivity growth. Data targeted policies and political characteristics across sector-region units are used to further characterize the different groups' weight in policymaking, and the effect of the implied unbalance on aggregate productivity. Electoral weight and being represented by business groups and associations are found to be important determinants of the policy benefits received by a sector in a region, especially when activities are located in regions affected by armed conflict. It is also found that the resulting imbalance of policies damages aggregate productivity.

En este documento se analizan los retos de la política de competencia en el sector de las tarjetas de pago a la luz de las enseñanzas de la teoría de los mercados de dos lados, para entregar elementos sólidos de análisis que contribuyan a un mejor entendimiento de la industria y de la racionalidad que debe guiar la intervención pública en ella, teniendo como objetivo la maximización del bienestar social. La revisión de la literatura económica relevante se combina con un análisis empírico de la industria en Colombia, en el que por primera vez se utilizan datos a nivel de transacción suministrados por Visa y Redeban, bajo acuerdos de confidencialidad, a investigar cómo funcionan estos mercados en la práctica. Del trabajo empírico hay por lo menos cuatro tipos de hallazgos interesantes. En primer lugar, se encuentra una alto grado de dispersión en las Comisiones de Adquirencia que pagan los comercios a los bancos adquirentes, indicativa de una varianza sustancial en la capacidad de negociación de los comercios ante los bancos. En segundo lugar, los datos muestran una correlación positiva entre las TII y las CA y una correlación negativa entre las TII y las CM en los mercados de tarjetas de pago. En tercer lugar, una interpretación cautelosa de pruebas estadísticas de causalidad permite concluir que en el mercado de las tarjetas de crédito (i) las TII no causan las CA; (ii) las TII no causan las CM, ni las CM causan las TII; y (iii) las CM no causan las CA. ; To contribute to a better understanding of the rationale for government intervention in the Colombian payment cards industry, and in particular of the challenges facing competition policy, this paper analyses the industry in light of the lessons from the theory of two-sided markets. A review of the relevant economic literatures combined with an empirical analysis of the industry in Colombia, in which transaction-level data made available by Visa and Redeban, under confidentiality agreements, are for the first time applied to the investigation of how these markets operate in practice. From the empirical work there are at least four findings of interest. First, we find a high degree of dispersion in merchant fees across sectors of activity, suggesting substantial variation in merchants' capacity to negotiate business conditions. Second, we find a positive correlation between interchange fees and merchant fees, and a negative correlation between interchange fees and customer fees charged to cardholders. Third, a cautious interpretation of causality tests allows us to conclude that in the case of credit cards (i) interchange fees do not cause merchant fees; (ii) there is no causality in either way between interchange fees and customer fees; and (iii) customer fees do not cause merchant fees.

The 2012 Colombian tax reform reduced payroll taxes and employer contributions to
health insurance by 13.5 percent, while also increasing corporate income taxes and
leaving untouched the benefits to workers financed through these taxes. Shifting
taxation from formal employment to other business activities is a policy recipe under
heated discussion in Latin America. The reform offers an ideal laboratory for studying
empirically the potential distortions against formal employment associated with payroll
taxes in contrast to other taxes on firms. We analyze the impact of the reform on
employment and wages using monthly firm-level data on all formal employment in nonpublic
firms in the country and a difference-in-differences approach that takes advantage of
the fact that a few sectors were exempt from the 2012 tax reform. We find a positive
average effect of 4.3 percent on employment and 2.7 percent on average firm wages, for
the average firm. The employment effect is found only for micro and small firms, whereas
the bulk of the employment is concentrated in medium and large firms, which show no
significant effect. According to these estimates, about 145,000 new jobs were created
between January and May of 2015 by virtue of the reform. These results are generally
supportive of efforts to reduce payroll taxes, though our findings on employment are
less robust than those on wages, and large firms do not seem to have benefitted. The
apparent lack of effect for medium and large employers is also a source of concern. We
speculate that it may be due to these firms' being more sensitive to the increase in
corporate taxation that financed the reduction in payroll taxes, but lack of access to
the relevant data prevents us from offering solid evidence regarding this
hypothesis. JEL Codes: H25, H32

This Working Paper analyzes the institutions that shape public-private collaboration for the design and implementation of productive development policies in Colombia. These policies are increasingly designed in the context of formal institutions and venues, with public-private collaboration being a pillar of that formal design. This paper focuses on two specific case studies: the Private Council for Competitiveness and its role in the National Competitiveness System and the Productive Transformation Program. Both suggest that public-private collaboration has contributed to the continuity of productive development policies across the country. Public-private collaboration has also played a significant part in achievements such as overcoming specific government failures and developing private organizational capabilities. Thus, a central message of this paper is that formal institutions have an important potential to advance adequate productive development policies.