Despite the promise to deliver results in July 2021, the year ended without knowing the recommendations of the Employment Mission and its focus from what was known in the thematic sessions contradicts the theses of Nobel Prize winners.
Before the Private Competitiveness Council, its director Santiago Levy invited to overcome the vision that maintains that “we only have to invest more and improve education to accelerate growth and this will end informality.” This sounds exotic in a country with poor results in international tests. Holding contrary ideas won the Nobel Sen, Duflo-Banerjee and Deaton. Levy’s position also contradicts the recommendations of the World Bank and ECLAC.
Levy invites us to overcome the belief that “To increase productivity in Colombia, we have to improve innovation and technological development programs, promote productive development policies, and seek better ways of inserting themselves into the international economy.”. A country with a current account deficit since it adopted economic opening and whose foreign trade depends largely on coal and oil Are you not called to review your model of presence in the global market?
The claims of the dairy union for the income of subsidized milk powder since The US is just the latest scene in a 30-year process …
Levy argues that “Informality and low productivity are not the result of a lack of investment or education, but are the result of the rules of the game“And adds that”social protection policy is a fundamental determinant of productivity in Colombia”. That was the entry thesis and it can be assumed that this is going to be the conclusion. We will see…
Mission experts repeat the mantra that the minimum wage is high relative to income distribution and this explains unemployment and that there are effects of the minimum wage on wages in the formal and informal sectors.
And they note that the minimum wage is used as a reference for different policies, but in the last negotiation of the minimum wage it was agreed to move forward in untying them.
How to maintain that unemployment is explained by costs after the Nobel has been awarded to Card, Angrist and Imbens precisely for demonstrating empirically that costs (such as wage increases) do not always cause unemployment?
On the other hand, systemic components are omitted: If credit is expensive, and according to Acopi (representative of SMEs that generate 80% of employment) it is not accessible to them, how is it supposed to finance the venture? Added to the limited importance that the Mission devoted to rural areas is the ignorance that there are more than 50% of rural properties without title deeds. There is a demonstrated incidence of displacement from the countryside, in informality, the cadastral updating progresses slowly and the restitution of land to the expelled is marginal.
The Mission has not said a word about it!
BEETHOVEN HERRERA VALENCIA
University professor: Nacional, Externado and Magdalena
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Employment Mission… antiNobel