Two years ago, I wrote about Colombia’s bad fiscal policy and used that column as an opportunity to unveil another one of my theorems.

The 20th Theorem specifically asserted that changes in the burden of government spending determine if fiscal policy is getting better or worse.

And every example I’ve investigated confirms my claim.

Two positive examples have been Greece and the Netherlands.

Sadly, there have been many more negative examples. After starting with Colombia, I subsequently documented fiscal deterioration in New York City, France, Brazil, Maryland, Washington, Australia, Germany, and Canada.

But I always try to remind people that fiscal policy is just one of the factors that drives prosperity.

And since Colombia was my first example of the 20th Theorem, and since I’m currently in Medellin, where I’ll be speaking on Monday about economic reform, let’s spend some time today taking a closer look at overall economic policy in that South American nation.

We’ll start, as I usually do, by looking at the country’s scores and rankings from the latest edition of Economic Freedom of the World.

As you can see, Colombia gets a mediocre grade for fiscal policy. The same is true for regulatory policy.

But the worst grades are for quality of governance (what EFW refers to as “legal system and property rights”), monetary policy, and trade policy.

The obvious takeaway is that there needs to be wide-ranging economic reform. In other words, Colombia needs Milei-ism.

Let’s look at some more data. Here’s a look at decades of economic policy scores from EFW. I’ve included other South American nations for purposes of comparison.

The good news is that Colombia has avoided the big losses of Venezuela and pre-Milei Argentina.

The bad news is that Colombia has not enjoyed a Chilean-style period of economic liberalization.

Policy mediocrity is not a recipe for prosperity, however, as shown by this chart based on the Maddison database.

I included the USA (green) and Hong Kong (blue) for examples of relative success.

And you can see Chile (orange) doing the best of the South American nations.

By contrast, Colombia (grey) is just stumbling along. Better than Venezuela and pre-Milei Argentina, of course, but that’s damning with faint praise.

Last but not least, I can’t resist adding a chart of fiscal policy based on IMF data. At the risk of understatement, policy has been moving in the wrong direction for several decades.

Colombia is way past the growth-maximizing size of government, whether you base that on academic evidence or my assessment.

I’ll conclude by addressing what I wrote in the title. What are the chances for economic reform in Colombia?

The perhaps-good news is that voters recently chose a right-wing president, Abelardo de la Espriella. And it’s definitely good news that they didn’t go with the left-wing candidate, Iván Cepeda.

It remains to be seen, however, whether Espriella is a Milei-style reformer or merely a right-wing statist as you sometimes get in South America. And, even if Espriella is good, his allies don’t control the legislature, so he would face the same challenges as Milei (especially before the 2025 mid-term elections) of changing major laws.

But he needs to propose bold reforms, regardless. Even if they are not enacted, he will be educating Colombians on what needs to happen.

As I wrote back in June, Latin America needs good policy, not just anti-left leaders.