ABSTRACT
Economic thinking in Colombia since the middle of the 20th century has gone through two phases, one from 1950 to 1990 and another from 1990 to 2020. The competing economic paradigms in the first phase were the cepalino structuralism, which proposed industrialization and the formation of regional trade blocs, and the resource efficiency approach that sought the development of an export economy through the optimal use of land, capital, and labor. In the second phase, the neoliberal paradigm was imposed, interrupted briefly by some manifestations of competition on the part of the cepalino paradigm. Economists’ direct participation in economic power explains the success of market-oriented reforms that dominated the international economic mainstream.
