The extra payments in December and the increase in consumption characteristic of the end-of-year holidays apparently helped Colombians’ financial worries to clear up for a time, although without removing the eye on the progress and state of the national economy and political announcements in the local context.
This is one of the conclusions of the Policy Uncertainty Index Economic for the last month of 2024, which Fedesarrollo presented this Friday -January 10- which also served to make a general assessment of the issues that most captured the attention of citizens during the 12 months that ended last week.
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First of all, it must be said that for December 2024, this indicator stood at 251, which is equivalent to an increase of 33 points compared to November 2024 (218) and an increase of 49 points compared to the record of December 2023 (202); thus completing 65 months above the average observed between 2000 and 2019 (100).
The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index in Colombia (Ipec) is a reference that focuses on measuring the uncertainty of economic policy in the local context, on a monthly basis and with a sectoral approach.through the count of words related to the situation in media news.
Unemployment in Colombia
iStock
“From a historical perspective, the Ipec captures periods of high uncertainty in economic policy, linked to episodes such as the economic emergency of 1996, the financial crisis of 1999, the fall in oil prices between 2014 and 2016, the Covid pandemic -19 in 2020 and the peak of the risk premium in October 2022,” they indicated in Fedesarrollo.
That said, the data also shows that for the period As a reference, the captured media news focused mainly on the topic of economic, social and geopolitical policy (44.9%), followed by economic activity (23.2%) and others (17.4%).
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“Compared to the previous month, the economic activity category showed the largest increase in participation (11.4 percentage points), while the financial variables sector was the one that showed the largest drop (12.4 percentage points),” they added.
For its part, the economic activity category showed the greatest increase compared to December 2023 (13.6 percentage points), while the category of economic, social and geopolitical policy showed the greatest contraction (8.9 percentage points).
In a simple way, for December alone, the state of the economy and the political movement and announcements encouraged the concerns of public opinion, while financial alerts or care for the economic stability of the home took a backseat, being overcome even by insecurity.
Plenary of the House of Representatives in the Congress of the Republic.
Pedro Vargas
Annual balance
Although the data for December were higher than those of the same month in previous years, when doing an annual review it is seen that uncertainty remains at levels very close to those of 2023, given that the Ipec average in 2024 was 245, being 2 points below the 2023 average (247) .
“The sectors of economic activity, financial variables, economic, social and geopolitical policy and others increased their sectoral participation (1.4, 1.3, 0.9 and 0.7 percentage points, respectively), while the insecurity sector showed a reduction of 4.3 percentage points,” said Fedesarrollo.
With all of the above, it is enough to say that 52.5% of the mentions and publications of the media and public opinion in 2024 were concentrated on social policy and geopolitics, while 15.6% were on economic activity.11% on insecurity and 8.9% on financial variables.
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