I’m posting today from Bogota, the capital of Colombia, during a week-long work visit recording business videos in Spanish. My opinion here isn’t formal economic analysis, just what’s obvious from a few days in the country. I don’t claim any expertise on this topic.

Still, if you search for “economic boom in Colombia” in any of the major web search engines, you’re going to see a lot of recent articles. And facts to back up the general optimism of the people I’m doing business with this week. Something special is going on here. This economy is growing despite the worldwide problems we’ve seen since 2007. And, perhaps more interesting, many of the articles and most of the people I’ve been talking to attribute the growth to fundamentals like political stability and decline of crime.

Some say that the U.S. so-called “war on drugs,” especially as it relates to the situation in Colombia of 10-20 years ago, may have helped this country stabilize and grow. So maybe it didn’t make much difference in the U.S., but it at least it probably helped the economy and the people of Colombia. Foreign investment grew more than 25% in the last year, and the per capita income has grown fourfold this century. The numbers are impressive. Colombia’s debt to GDP runs about 27 percent, compared to 73 percent in the United States. And Economic growth is running at about six percent per year.

I post here occasionally about my country-in-law, Mexico, where I spent 10 years of my youth. It seems only fair to post here about what’s happening in Colombia. Good news doesn’t get enough coverage.

(Note: the image here was courtesy of the Colombian embassy)

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