Recent budget alerts, the possibility that the fiscal rule is not met, the ads made by President Donald Trump in the United States, the movements of the dollar and the threat of inflation; These are issues that apparently generating a storm that is encouraging the uncertainty of Colombians, which At the beginning of the year they are focusing their attention on economic and political affairs.
This is one of the conclusions left by the index of uncertainty of economic policy in Colombia by January 2025, presented by fedesarrollo and shows that this indicator remains above average, although record some minor improvements compared to the immediately previous month and the last 12 months.
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“In January 2025, the IPEC was located in 195, completing 76 months above the average of the period 2000 – 2019 (100). With this, in January the index was 70 points below the level of the previous month (265) and 20 points below the level observed in January 2024 (215), ”they reported from this economic and social research center.
In these data also attracts attention that the level reached in January 2025 It was 63 points lower than the average of 2024 (258) and 72 points less than the average of all 2023 (267); With which it can be interpreted that although there are advances in the perception that Colombians have regarding the situation of the country and the focus of the media, the agitated environment in public opinion is still maintained.
Colombian pesos
Istock
“The uncertainty index of economic policy in Colombia of Fedesarrollo captures the uncertainty of economic policy in Colombia with a monthly periodicity and with a sectoral approach, through the count of words related to the situation in news of the media” , they explained.
To better understand how this indicator works, in Fedesarrollo they said that “from a historical perspective, the IPEC captures periods of high uncertainty of economic policy, linked to episodes such as the economic emergency of 1996, the financial crisis of 1999, the fall of the oil prices between 2014 and 2016, The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the risk premium peak in October 2022 ”.
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Main Agenda topics
Based on all the above, the IPEC Sector classification showed that 63.2% of the news was concentrated on issues of economic, social and geopolitical policy, followed by economic activity (21.1%), others (7.8 %), insecurity (5.3%) and financial variables (2.6%).
Compared to December 2024, an increase was observed in the participation of the categories of economic, social and geopolitical policy (11.3 percentage points) and economic activity (0.8 percentage points). On the other hand, the categories of others, financial variables and insecurity experienced a reduction of -10.7, -1,1 and -0.3 percentage points, respectively.
Approval of pension reform
House of Representatives
In the interannual comparison with January 2024, the sectors that increased their participation were economic activity (8.8 percentage points), others (3.2 percentage points) and economic, social and geopolitical policy (0.1 percentage points); while the sectors of insecurity and financial variables decreased their presence in the IPEC sector classification in January 2025.
Likewise, insecurity participation fell by -10.1 percentage points, while financial variables showed a reduction of -2.0 percentage points, which puts a reconfiguration on the table in the perception of the economy, with greater emphasis on political and social factors, to the detriment of the relevance of security and financial variables within the index.
