Beyond market access: the political economy of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Colombia and South Korea

This project seeks to evaluate the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Colombia and South Korea (in force since 2016) according to two fundamental aspects: (1) its contribution to a national development strategy in Colombia, and (2) its sectoral distributional effects. To analyze these two dimensions, the perspective of International Political Economy (IPE) is used, on which the researchers recently published a textbook. More precisely, and in contrast to existing evaluations of FTAs in the Colombian literature, the project aims to analyze their political consequences. On the one hand, identifying the winners and losers of a trade agreement within a specific country is at the heart of IPE. The novelty of this project lies in complementing the identification strategy based on the relative incomes of different sectors of the Colombian economy as a result of the FTA with a non-economic analysis that focuses on the gains and losses in terms of political power and specific capacities of a wider range of actors in Colombian society. On the other hand, given the resurgence of the geoeconomic perspective in contemporary EPI, FTAs have become an instrument of statecraft. The project also takes the Colombian state's level of analysis to examine the results of the FTA. To this end, a more holistic and purely political assessment is required in terms of how the FTA with South Korea has contributed to strengthening (or weakening) the national development strategy. The project is in the form of a pilot study, i.e., after verifying the usefulness of the methodology applied to a specific case in terms of the results obtained, the aim is to scale up the format to a comparative analysis with more FTA cases. statecraft.

Colombia; South Korea; Trade; FTA; International Political Economy

• An academic article in a Q1 quartile indexed journal on the theoretical or analytical contribution of the project to the field of International Political Economy
• An academic article in a Q3 quartile indexed journal on the empirical results of the case study of the FTA between Colombia and South Korea
• Policy brief with public policy recommendations
• Creation of a website
• Explanatory video on the main findings (public dissemination)
• Podcast episode (30-40 min) in collaboration with a recognized program
• Public socialization event in Bogotá