Política Fiscal, Ingresos y Desigualdad en Colombia (1990-2015)[Fiscal Policy, Income And Inequality In Colombia (1990-2015)]

Due to the supported economic growth of the first decade of the 21st century, Colombia managed to reduce the levels of poverty and inequality. Nevertheless, the country continued to present one of the most inequitable economies in the world maintaining a high income concentration. In that sense, this paper aims at analyzing the fiscal policy incident in the income distribution. To that effect, the redistributive impact of the fiscal action in Colombia, Latin America and the group of country members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) were examined. Besides, a historical follow-up of the income and public expenditures behavior in Colombia was carried out from 1990 until 2015, highlighting two fundamental facts: 1) from the constitutional reform of 1991, the social public expenditure presented a remarkable growth as a response to the fiscal commitments acquired by the state and 2) the Income Tax and the Value-Added tax (VAT) have been the props on which the national tax structure has been supported. With these elements and the information supplied by the National Survey of Income and Home Expenses, there was approached the study of the distributive incident in Colombia, estimating Gini’s indicators, the income concentration, Kakwani and Reynolds-Smolensky. The results of the present investigation allow to conclude that though the Income Tax to natural people, the Value-Added Tax (VAT) and the public expenditure show a progressive behavior, their redistributive capacity is limited; that is why the Gini’s coefficient don’t present significant variations after the fiscal action.