Assessment and recommendations

Colombia is a large country that covers an area of 1.14 million square kilometres (almost twice the size of Texas or France), bordering two oceans and encompassing part of Amazonia and of the Andes. The country’s ethnic minorities include Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, which enjoy special status in the nation. Regional economies specialise in activities like intensive (tropical) agriculture, extractive industries, manufacturing and services (especially in urban areas). This regional diversity, however, is not reflected in the territorial statistics. An abundance of administrative data is available at the national and municipal level, but Colombia has no spatial framework for organising regional data. This has been something of an obstacle to a more thorough analysis. In Colombia, the data for the OECD’s smallest unit of territorial analysis, Territorial Level 3 (TL3), is not available. Such data could have been useful for comparison with TL3 regions in the OECD as a whole (1 791 regions in 34 countries). Most of the analysis in this review was carried out at Territorial Level 2 (TL2), which, in Colombia, includes the 32 departments and the capital, Bogotá. This report should be considered the first step in a process to help bring Colombia up to OECD standards in terms of regional statistics and indicators.