EGOB - School of Government

The objective of this course is to provide students with tools needed to approach the processes that determine social arrangements and how they changed through time. Some of these arrangements include: State´s organization and its functions, limitation of governmental powers, law enactment and enforcement. Similarly, these arrangements determine up to what extent and forms the central power is involved in the daily activities of people and companies, control over economy and incentives to development. Based upon the understanding of these processes, students are expected to build a more comprehensive perspective about how their professional and social life are mutually determined by the other. This course will serve as Introduction to the option of Government, and also as CBU type B.

The School regularly organizes seminars that should be compulsorily attended by the Master´s Degree students. These seminars will include the participation of public leading characters and specialist in different areas within the transversal axes of the Colombian context in terms of government and public policies, decentralization and territoriality, citizenship, civil society and participation, armed conflict, violence and peace-building processes, globalization, among others.

This course has two modules. The first studies the process of agenda, formulation, implementation and assessment of the public policies from a conceptual and theoretical perspective, as from the practical perspective, applied to the Colombian case. The second module goes over aspects related to the political economy of the public policies. We explore the links between different political institutions and public policies by understanding the restrictions, preferences, interests and incentives that tend to condition the actions of different actors who take part on the design, formation and execution of the public policies.

This course is designed is a fashion that allows students to handle the main concepts and tools related to the theory of determining prices and appointing of resources. At the end of the course, the student will be able to handle the main concepts of the microeconomics theory in a formal fashion, apply those concepts in economic politics and understand the main fundaments of the functioning of the market, as the rationality of State intervention.

This course seeks to provide the students with the basic necessary tools for the analysis and interpretation of quantitative data, by emphasizing on its application to problems related to public policies and management. The student will develop the skills to analyze in a critical manner empirical studies, and gains the capacity to decide upon what data and what type of analysis are required for the making of decisions in the public domain.

At the end of this course, students must be familiar with the arguments for the active role of the State in the market economy and the tools needed for analysis. Likewise, the models on the different ways how the State interacts with the markets and the social decision mechanisms will be studied. Finally, students must be familiar with the organization of the Colombian public sector, its decision-making mechanisms and its main current problems.   The course is divided in five parts: (i) a general introduction, (ii) tax agencies in Colombia, (iii) public expenditure theory, (iv) public revenue theory, and (v) debt and macroeconomic aspects of the tax policy. The introduction will cover, from a conceptual standpoint, the way how the State interacts with the markets and its justification, and a brief recount of the tax doctrine evolution will be made. The second part covers the non-financial public sector in Colombia and its recent evolution. The course will delve into some of the issues associated with this topic. The third and fourth parts will cover expenditure and revenues, respectively, and will be more technical. Special attention will be given to the most common expenditure programs. the fifth part of the course will cover macroeconomic topics (debt, IMF).

This course explores the basic tools that a public administrator in Colombia should have. The fundamental topics to be analyzed are: the regulatory production process, where the rules, administrative acts and main institutions that determine the regulatory production process are analyzed, regulatory approval, where the different forms that exist to make an effective regulation from the legal point of view are studied, execution, where the main requirements (budget and institutional) to execute public policies are described, and control, which studies the main types of control that exist once the regulation or public policy is implemented. These topics are studied in reference to the framework of the Political Constitution of 1991 as regards Fundamental Rights. Therefore, the rulings of the Constitutional Court on public policies, state structure and fundamental rights are studied in each module.