cannabisnews.com: Colombia to Adjust GDP to Include Drugs!





Colombia to Adjust GDP to Include Drugs!
Posted by FoM on June 27, 1999 at 13:17:44 PT
BY Larry Rohter-New York Times 
Source: San Jose Mercury News
BOGOTÁ, Colombia The Colombian government has begun to include income earned from growing illegal drugs in the way it calculates the size of the nation's economy.
The move is controversial but necessary, Colombian officials say, to take account of the increasingly uncontrollable reality of the drug trade, which by obviously imprecise assessments could amount to between one-quarter and one-third of Colombia's legal exports, or as much as $4 billion a year.By including revenues from narcotics in gross domestic product, Colombian government economists say they hope to obtain a more accurate measure of all economic activity in the country.``This is a purely technical exercise, not a political measure,'' said Tomás González Estrada, the chief economic adviser to President Andrés Pastrana Arango.But some in Washington, particularly congressional Republicans who have criticized other Pastrana policies, have attacked the decision as capitulation to drug dealers.Officials here, though, respond that they are merely complying with guidelines set by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for potential borrowers, and that other countries, such as Bolivia, use the same system.The official recalculation could add as much as 1 percent to the value of the deteriorating Colombian economy, which has a gross national product of nearly $80 billion a year.For the moment, the new accounting system does not include the much larger sums of money earned from the processing or trafficking of cocaine, marijuana and heroin, only the growing of the raw materials. Rene Verswyvel Villamizar, director of the National Statistical Administrative Department, said that cultivation ``is as far as we can go with certainty.''According to the new statistics, drug crops added about 854 billion pesos to the Colombian economy in 1994, or just over $1 billion, calculated at the average exchange rate for that year. In 1995, the only other year for which figures are available, the estimate slipped because of market conditions in the United States to $762 million at the time.The United Nations estimates that Colombia exports about 772 tons of cocaine a year, growing and processing roughly half the world supply.``We are realists,'' Verswyvel said.
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Comment #1 posted by Roland Matthews on June 24, 2000 at 15:29:46 PT:
economic value of marijuana
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