The Indexation of tariffs in the Colombian Energetic Sector and impact in a common energetic market in Latin America
Authors: Edigson Perez Bedoya 
Published: December 2007

The indexation of tariffs with the producer price index, PPI, in Colombia, has become in a way out for the agents that participate in the Colombian Energetic Market. The central gobernment, though the policies fixes by the gas and energy regulation commission, GERC, set up the tariffs to be charged to small users. Among them, the residential sector is one of the most affected within that model badly called "of competence". The present papers pretends to describe the risks that are encountered within this kind of systems, specially if the tendencies of economic globalization are continued. Latin America must begin to establish a serious discussion that let set up in short term, the general outline of an energetic integration in the whole continent, and within this frame work, the indexation of tariffs with indexes out of the market do not permit to unmask the efficiency or inefficiency of the companies interracting in the energetic market.

Introduction

The word "integration" means the union of parts, interests and objectives. America faces one of the major challenges for the XXI century, the present movements that are in course within the international globalization process demand the local governments to try to the tie the concept of integration with common interests of the region, trying to reduce the asymmetry that is generated by commercial and economic interests.

The difficulties to advance in such process are well known: difficulties that are translated into misery of about 40% according to CEPAL: in political movements of extreme left or right, and high in come concentration always behind the population. But the causes of the delay in America is not the aim of this paper, the objective is to recover the concept of union, remembering how the oil bonanza in Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador and Brasil and the cupper in Chile, have stood out at international level, but to the interior there are no real changes in quality of life and in the reduction of inequality between developed countries and Latin America. Precisely, this late region will be the future of humanity, since it has 60% of biodiversity, the biggest lung of the world in the Amazon zone and other renewable and no renewable natural resources.

The time has come in which, just for convenience, the Latin American countries are integrated to create common developing process, and in this case the energetic integration may be the key of development. The trade agreements in the region, CARICOM, Andean community, NAFTA, Mescosur, the group of the three, among others, have agreed upon starting process of tariff gradual cleaning in some products and protections to other sectors within an economic game world wide known as economic opening, but that within the competition and the continental development the results in growth or development are not concreted.

The proposal of thinking about an integrated management of energetic resources is presented, because the optimum utilization of these resources is the key to negotiate with the countries that depend on them and, why not, to look for a suitable developing model as it was once stated by Raul Prebish and then by the new structuralism.