Public spending on social protection in Colombia : analysis and proposals

This paper studies the main social programs of the Colombian public sector. Traditionally, health and education expenditure have played the lion´s share both in the theoretical discussions and in the allocation of social spending in Colombia. I argue that other programs, with more indirect impact on the creation of human capital, should have full citizenship in a country at the level of development of Colombia. Even within the existing non-health and non-education social spending, the current allocation is very skewed towards programs that do not benefit the poor or often do so only marginally. In particular, pensions take up an inordinate share of social spending, and are paid almost exclusively to the top two quintiles of the distribution. This leaves very little room for other programs - mostly programs towards children and families and labor market programs. These programs, in turn, suffer from problems of their own, in particular an almost complete lack of any usable evaluation, an excessive fragmentation into many agencies and subprograms, and - an almost unavoidable consequence - lack of clarity on their goals.