Colombia grew 3.7% a year for two decades. It now grows 1.63%

Between 2003 and 2025, Colombia’s economy grew 3.7% a year on average. That is the yardstick. Not a target, not an opinion — what actually happened over twenty-three years.

Over the last three closed years — 2023, 2024 and 2025 — the average was 1.63%.

Less than half.

That is the whole headline, and it needs no adjectives. What it does need is context, because comparing governments by growth is easier to get wrong than right.

The size of what we are talking about

Before the percentages, the scale. This is what the Colombian economy weighs, in 2025 figures:

A note for Spanish-speaking readers: in Spanish un billón means 10¹² — what English calls a trillion — while English billion is 10⁹. The same figure is US$457.4 billion in English and US$457,4 mil millones in Spanish.

From here on everything is in percentages and over the real series, at constant prices, which strips out inflation. It is the only way to compare different years: between 2024 and 2025 nominal GDP rose by some 147 trillion pesos, but much of that is prices rising, not more production.

Twenty-three years in one chart

Three things stand out, and none of them shows up in an average.

First, the hole in 2020: −7.2%, the only contraction of the period and the deepest on modern record. Second, the spike in 2021: +10.8%, the highest growth on the chart. Third, the flat stretch of the last three years, sitting below the gold line.

The hole and the spike are the same event told twice. More on that below.

Six governments, one rule

Uribe I is the highest at 5.15% a year, with Santos I just behind at 5.10%. Petro is the lowest at 1.63%, with three of four years closed.

Before drawing conclusions from that table, three traps need defusing. They are what makes half the comparisons circulating online meaningless.

Trap 1: a rebound is not management

In 2021 the economy grew 10.8%. It sounds like a miracle. It is not.

The year before, it had fallen 7.2%. When something collapses and then returns to where it was, the percentage increase looks enormous without a single step forward. That is base arithmetic, not performance.

The proof is in the level, not the rate: the economy did not pass its 2019 size until well into 2021. The +10.8% built nothing new; it recovered what was lost.

That is why Duque’s 3.53% average is inflated. It contains the worst fall of the period and the largest rebound, and both are the pandemic. His four-year cumulative figure, +13.86%, describes his term far more honestly than any annual average.

The practical rule: when you see spectacular growth, look at the year before.

Trap 2: the president does not supply the tailwind

Between 2006 and 2015 Colombia had its best decade in a long time. Uribe II averaged 3.90% and Santos I reached 5.10%.

Overlay the international price curve for oil and coal and the two move almost identically. Dollars came in, foreign investment arrived, and the treasury collected royalties and taxes from a sector at its peak.

When commodities collapsed, growth fell with them. Santos II averaged 2.27%: same president, same team, less than half the growth of his first term.

This does not mean management is irrelevant. It means a large share of the outcome is decided in markets no Colombian government controls — which applies equally to the one who got the tailwind and the one who got the headwind.

Trap 3: terms do not fit inside calendar years

Colombian presidents take office on 7 August. GDP is measured in calendar years. The two will never line up.

Any comparison by term — including this one — splits the transition year in half and assigns it whole to someone. The criterion here is stated: the four calendar years following inauguration. It is a convention, not a truth, and anyone using a different one will get different numbers without either being dishonest.

What matters is not which convention you use. It is that you say it.

What held recent growth up

The most interesting figure of the current period is not the average — it is the composition.

In the first quarter of 2026 the economy grew 2.2%. Of that, 0.9 points came from public administration, defence, education and health, which grew 5.7%. Government consumption rose 7.8%. Banco de Bogotá’s research desk calculated that 46% of the growth was explained by higher public spending, and that without it growth would have been 1.4%. Corficolombiana, stripping out electoral spending, put it at 1.6%.

In the second quarter growth rose to 3.5%, the best of the period. And there the same line — public administration, education and health — grew 10.0% and contributed 1.7 of the 3.5 points: nearly half the growth from a single sector. Government consumption rose 12.2%.

Put without loading it with intent: the best quarter of the period was also the most dependent on public spending, in an election year. That is not an accusation; it is the official breakdown of the figure.

The number that decides what comes next

There is a figure that appears in no headline and outweighs all the others combined.

Today’s investment is the productive capacity of five years from now. Factories, machinery, roads, software, housing. A country investing 16% of its GDP does not grow at 4%, however much it intends to: it does not have the means.

And this did not start with the current government. The decline has been running for more than a decade. But it did not stop either: in the fourth quarter of 2025 gross fixed capital formation fell 9.3% year on year, housing investment 8.5%, and mining closed the year at −6.2%.

That is the real challenge for the next government, whoever it is. It is not fixed with a speech: private investment responds to stable rules, not to promises.

How to read a growth number

Three questions that work on any GDP figure you come across:

1. Which year is it compared against? If the previous year was bad, growth looks better than it is.
2. Where did it come from? Growth pushed by public spending does not sustain itself; growth pushed by investment does.
3. Is it above the historical average? For Colombia, that line sits at 3.7%.

With those three, you already read better than most headlines.

How this was built

The figures are the DANE official real GDP series, taken from Banco de la República’s Economic Indicators Bulletin, consulted in September 2026.

One technical point worth stating: the 2015-base series starts in 2005, so 2003, 2004 and 2005 come from the previous 2005-base series. The two meet at 2006, where both give 6.7%. It is a defensible splice, but not a homogeneous series end to end.

2026 is excluded from the averages: it has two quarters — +2.2% and +3.5% — and is not a closed year.

Period averages cover the four calendar years following each inauguration. The cumulative figure is compounded growth over those same years.

DANE revises its figures. The ones here are those in force today, and they are not the ones the press reported at first publication: 2023 was announced at 0.6% and now stands at 0.8%; 2024 was announced at 1.7% and now stands at 1.5%. If someone shows you different numbers, both of you are probably right about different moments.

The full series is available in the file attached to this article.

And if you want to go from macro to ground level

This is the whole country. If what you care about is your sector, your customers or your suppliers — what they actually sold, whether they grew, whether they made money — that is public too, company by company, in the directory of 29,312 companies.

Because the economy did not grow 1.63%. It grew differently at every company, and those differences are what actually affect someone.

Sources

• Banco de la República — Economic Indicators Bulletin, real GDP table
• DANE — GDP technical bulletin, Q2 2026
• DANE — GDP press release, Q1 2026
• DANE — GDP press release, Q4 2025
• DANE — Historical GDP series
• El Colombiano — Public spending explained 46% of Q1 2026 growth
• El Colombiano — The economy grew 3.5% in Q2 2026
• La República — Investment at its lowest in two decades, at 16% of GDP
• Portafolio — Investment, the blemish on 2025 growth