Colombian Trade Protectionism Against China

Colombia has been pointing out during the last decade as one of the most interesting and promising trade partners of the Latin American region. By2012Colombia is already the leading economy of the new emerging units named CIVETS (Colombia. Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa). The Colombian economy shows incredible annual growth on its domestic market as well in its worldwide imports/exports figures, even though its full potential is still to be unleashed. However, when it comes to relations with China during the last decades, there have been strong protecting measures in several cases. Along the first part of this thesis, motivations and consequences of those protectionist actions from Colombia against China will be qualitatively analysed. After that chapter, as a case study for the second quantitative part of the work, an updated analysis of the footwear industry will be provided, as one of the most important in Colombia in terms of growth (up to20%annually during the last five years) and of course one of the biggest in China in terms of production and exports (almost75%of world’s production). For that quantitative section, I will be presenting and analysing, one by one, potentially relevant variables for a linear regression model of the industry in question. Relevance and drawbacks of each of those potential variables will be presented and discussed.