Recent Macroeconomic Performance in Colombia : What Went Wrong?

At the end of the last decade, real activity in Colombia underwent the sharpest recession it had suffered in the last fifty years. With the aim to explain this phenomenon, we are postulating a non-triangular structural VAR model to describe the dynamics of output, prices, unemployment and wages during the last two decades. Evidence suggests that, in the long run, monetary policy has been neutral in regard to both output and unemployment while the main reasons for the increase in the latter have been the way in which wages have been determined (because of backward-formed expectations) and the increase in non-wage labour costs