Economy - overview:
Colombia experienced accelerating growth between 2002 and 2007, chiefly due to advancements in domestic security, to rising commodity prices, and to President URIBE's promarket economic policies. Colombia's sustained growth helped reduce poverty by 20% and cut unemployment by 25% since 2002. Additionally, investor friendly reforms to Colombia's hydrocarbon sector and the US-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement (CTPA) negotiations attracted record levels of foreign investment. Inequality, underemployment,and narcotrafficking remain significant challenges, and Colombia's infrastructure requires significant updating in order to sustain expansion. Economic growth slipped in 2008, and turned negative in 2009, as a result of the global financial crisis and weakening demand for Colombia's exports, despite aggressive measures by the Central Bank to lower interest rates. In response, URIBE's administration has cut capital controls, arranged for emergency credit lines from multilateral institutions, and promoted investment incentives such as Colombia's modernized free trade zone mechanism, legal stability contracts, and new bilateral investment treaties and trade agreements. The government has also encouraged exporters to diversify their customer base away from the United States and Venezuela, Colombia's largest trading partners, although China surpassed Venezuela as Colombia's number two export destination in late 2009. Nevertheless, the business sector continues to be concerned about the impact of a global recession on Colombia's economy, an appreciating domestic currency, as well as the approval of the CTPA, which is stalled in the US Congress.

GDP (purchasing power parity):
$400.3 billion (2009 est.)