View of the port of Cartagena, on February 4, 2022. Sebastian Barros Salamanca (Getty Images)
The first macro data of the Colombian economy since Gustavo Petro became president shows that the reactivation continues at full speed: the gross domestic product (GDP) grew 12.6% in the second quarter of 2022, compared to the same quarter last year.
This data is better than that of the quarter from January to March, when it grew 8.6%, and is in the highest range of the experts' projections, which ranged from 10.8% of BBVA Research to 13% of the Bank from Bogota.
The V-shaped rebound, as explained on Tuesday by Julieth Solano, deputy director in charge of the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), at a press conference, was marked out especially by trade and transportation.
Solano explained that the sales for Father's Day, which in Colombia is celebrated on the third Sunday of June, and the payment of the semi-annual premium, an additional payment of half a monthly salary that is delivered in June to workers who have a work contract, boosted sales, especially in areas such as recreation.
GDP grew 1.5% compared to the first quarter of the year.
"This dynamic of promotions, special dates, vacations, and the greater willingness of households to access these goods and services, has allowed this dynamism of trade," Solano said, to explain the strong growth of trade, which has grown by 23.3% between the second quarter of 2021 and 2022. In any case, as the official explained, the growth of the second quarter of 2021 had a brake due to the national strike of May 2021.
The negative point is in the primary activities, those that extract resources from the earth.
Both agriculture, livestock and fishing, which are counted as a single item, as well as mining, are still below the size they had before the pandemic, measured in February 2020. Construction has not finished recovering either.
Despite that, the economy is in full recovery.
"When we compare ourselves with 2019, quarter by quarter we have been having a better performance," explained Solano.
In other words, the size of the economy has already fully recovered from the fall due to the pandemic.
In fact, this second quarter of 2022 the economy was 11.3% larger when compared to the same quarter of 2019.
The data reaffirms that the recovery is one of the fastest in the world, something that data from DANE have already been showing and that entities such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have highlighted. .
"Colombia is the economy that has the best performance in terms of annual variation" among OECD member countries, which in no case exceeded 7%, Solano summarized.
Despite the good news, the most recent data on unemployment and inflation remain high, factors that undermine its performance, and the economy maintains a double face of accelerated growth and poor social results.
According to the most recent data from DANE, unemployment remains in double digits, with 11.3% in June this year, with 22.1 million people working, still below the 22.5 million cap of June 2019, before the pandemic hit.
But behind that figure there is another more worrying one: today these workers support 14.2 million people who are not in the labor force because they are children, older adults, students or in general they neither work nor look for work, when before the pandemic that figure hovered around 12 million.
In addition, inflation remains strong and growing.
In July it was 0.81%, to add 10.21% from August 2021 to July 2022 and 7.96% in the first seven months of the year.
These are the highest figures so far this century and represent not only a challenge for the monetary authorities, who have increased the intervention rate to 9%, but also for the economic recovery to reach the majority of Colombians.
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