This country review report offers an independent analysis of major issues facing the use of school resources in Colombia from an international perspective. It provides a description of national policies, an analysis of strengths and challenges, and a proposal of possible future approaches.

Seventeen in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2020 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity.

The financial stability report (FSR) of the Banco de la República of Colombia (BR) provides broad coverage of macroeconomic environment and the assessment of risks in the financial system. The biannual report is considered as one of the main sources of data and information on financial stability in Colombia, and the BR makes presentation on the key messages to the public at the time of the publication. It also plays an important role in a broader framework of systemic risk monitoring—it is presented to the financial security network, which is a set of entities that share a financial stability objective. The BR, Financial superintendency of Colombia, Fogafin and the Ministry of Finance are members.

Introduces the geography, history, people, and culture of the country known as the Gateway to South America.

Colombia’s western Coffee Region is renowned for the whiteness of its inhabitants, who are often described as respectable pioneer families who domesticated a wild frontier and planted coffee on the forested slopes of the Andes. Some local inhabitants, however, tell a different tale—of white migrants rapaciously usurping the lands of indigenous and black communities. Muddied Waters examines both of these legends, showing how local communities, settlers, speculators, and politicians struggled over jurisdictional boundaries and the privatization of communal lands in the creation of the Coffee Region. Viewing the emergence of this region from the perspective of Riosucio, a multiracial town within it, Nancy P. Appelbaum reveals the contingent and contested nature of Colombia’s racialized regional identities. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian elite intellectuals, Appelbaum contends, mapped race onto their mountainous topography by defining regions in racial terms. They privileged certain places and inhabitants as white and modern and denigrated others as racially inferior and backward. Inhabitants of Riosucio, however, elaborated local narratives about their mestizo and indigenous identities that contested the white mystique of the Coffee Region. Ongoing violent conflicts over land and politics, Appelbaum finds, continue to shape local debates over history and identity. Drawing on archival and published sources complemented by oral history, Muddied Waters vividly illustrates the relationship of mythmaking and racial inequality to regionalism and frontier colonization in postcolonial Latin America.

Treats in concise and objective manner the dominant historical, social, political, economic, and national security aspects of contemporary Colombia. Chapter bibliographies appear at the end of the book.