Dr. Juan David Gutiérrez Rodríguez

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Candidato a doctor (PhD) en políticas públicas de la Blavatnik School of Government de la Universidad de Oxford. Mis áreas de investigación en Oxford giran entorno a la administración de los recursos naturales no renovables, la inversión pública y la descentralización en Colombia. Específicamente, estoy investigando las decisiones de inversión con recursos de las regalías de los gobiernos locales Colombianos. Más información sobre mi perfil de investigación la pueden encontrar acá: www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/people/juan-david-gutierrez . Me gradué de abogado en la Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá), tengo una maestría en derecho y economía de las Universidades de Bolonia y Erasmus Rotterdam y una maestría en políticas públicas en América Latina de la Universidad de Oxford. He trabajado más de 10 años tanto en el sector privado como en el sector público en asuntos legales y de políticas públicas. Además he sido profesor de cátedra de las Facultades de Derecho de la Universidad Javeriana ("derecho de la competencia", 2007-2014) y de la Universidad de los Andes ("argumentación en procesos civiles", 2012-2013). En el 2007 fundé un blog sobre el derecho y las políticas de competencia en América Latina que publica textos de 18 expertos de la región y que recibe alrededor de 100 visitas diariamente: lalibrecompetencia.com . Recientemente abrí un blog sobre inversión pública en Colombia: www.invepub.com . Mi cuenta de Twitter es: @JuanDGut .

CITA: lasillavacia.com
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Introduction

Shortly after oil poured out of Arauca in December 1985, the locals and the national media started referring to the region as Saudi Arauca due to the huge inflow of petro-dollars and the upsurge of violence (Semana 1986). Since then, the municipality’s main source of income has been oil revenues, more specifically royalties paid by the companies that operate the oil fields. On average, between 1996 and 2015, royalties generated 54% of Arauca’s total income.

Oil revenues generated expectations of increased wellbeing for Arauca’s inhabitants and newcomers. However, a few years after Arauca started receiving a fiscal windfall from oil production, the municipal government earned national notoriety due to the squandering of its resources (El Tiempo 1992, 1997a, Semana 1994, 1995). Currently, Araucanos believe that because of their government’s mismanagement and corruption they have not received enough bang for the buck from oil revenues. Arauca’s policy outcomes did not surpass significantly the outcomes of the average Colombian municipality even though in the last three decades it was one of the wealthiest subnational governments.

To address this puzzle, this paper examines the quality of public investment management (PIM) between 1985 and 2015 in Arauca. The quality of PIM is understood in this research as the efficiency and effectiveness of the decision-making processes and institutional arrangements to deliver public investment projects and programmes.

After a few days of doing fieldwork in Arauca there was one remark mentioned by a local politician that caught my attention: she claimed that in Arauca “even cowboys won public bids to built roads”. Although it sounded a bit exaggerated, after I returned from fieldwork and started reading judicial decisions on the investment of royalties I came across a case with a remarkable resemblance.

In 1993 a shop owner that supplied Arauca’s mayoralty filed a lawsuit against the government for not paying 1,500 baskets full of groceries and tools that were purchased and distributed by the government. The mayor had distributed the goods through a political broker between September 1991 and March 1992 just before the local elections. However, before the mayor’s term finished he fled the country due to the initiation of criminal case against him related to embezzlement (CSJ 2005). Despite of the fact that the shop owner had effectively delivered the goods, the mayoralty had not registered an official accounting of the request. Hence, after the following mayor commenced his term he did not accept to pay a debt that was not formally registered. However, the new mayor asked the shop owner to provide additional supplies of goods and offered a “solution” to the previous debt with a novel mechanism: the mayor proposed the supplier to repay the debts by awarding him (with another partner) a public works contract (building a roundabout). The shop owner did not accept the offer because it would entail receiving fewer revenues since he had to share a part with the public works secretary. Moreover, a witness testified that the same mayor had extended to him a similar offer, so it seems that the shop owner’s case was not unique (CE 2000).

This case illustrates the problems with PIM quality that are assessed in this paper. This paper evaluates the quality of PIM of Arauca’s mayoralty with an emphasis on the institutional arrangements and processes linked to the investment of oil royalties. The public investment cycle may be decomposed in four basic stages: project appraisal, selection, implementation and evaluation (Dabla-Norris, Brumby et al. 2012). I will focus on the third stage: the processes carried out by the municipal government of Arauca to implement investment projects financed with royalties. More specifically, this section uses four indicators to assess the quality of the processes undertaken in the implementation stage: the transparency of the processes, the competition in procurement processes, and the efficiency and effectiveness of project implementation. The paper analyses qualitative data and quantitative data to assess the quality of PIM in Arauca.

1.1 Transparency of government

From the late 1980s until the late 2000s Arauca’s mayoralty had very opaque accounting practices with regards to the inflow and management of oil revenues. Two types of (illegal) financial strategies were used in the first five mayoral terms to generate this opacity. The first (1988-1990) and second (1990-1992) elected mayors of Arauca illegally invested significant public funds in securities issued by private financial companies (CSJ 2004, 2005). In practice, this strategy allowed to bypass the budgeting procedure, thereby increasing the secrecy of the inflow of revenues and the use of these resources. A decade later, in 2009, the eighth elected mayor of Arauca was dismissed from his office and banned from public positions by the Procuraduría General de la Nación (PGN) who found that he had illegally invested a significant amount of public funds in dubious financial derivatives (Paredes 2010). Additionally, the second and third elected mayors (1992-1994) allegedly spent resources that were not included in the formal accounts of the mayoralty to purchase goods (e.g. food and tools) that were discretionally distributed by political brokers (CE 2000).

The second strategy used by Arauca’s mayors to conceal how oil revenues were used in the 1990s and early 2000s was to manage oil revenues through multiple bank accounts, thereby decreasing the traceability of their transactions. For example, the fourth elected mayor of Arauca (1995-1997) used 18 bank accounts (PGN 2005a) and the sixth elected mayor (2001-2003) 13 bank accounts (El Tiempo 2003a, Semana 2003a, PGN 2006). Furthermore, an audit carried out by the National Comptroller’s Office (CGR) in 1999 concluded that the lack of transparency in the management of oil revenues was particularly acute in Arauca. With regards to the period 1997-1998, the report concluded: “[Arauca] does not know what quantity of royalties are entering, nor how much of is spent, because of the deficient system of information and budgetary management” (El Tiempo 1999b).

In contrast with the previous 25 years of opaque government, after 2012 the municipal government of Arauca reached and remained at high levels of transparency according to the Open Government Index of the PGN (Figure 1). The index includes three indicators that assess the openness of municipal governments: information organisation (internal data management), information exposure (diffusion of information to citizens) and information feedback (interaction between governments and citizens) (Remolina 2014).

Different strategies implemented by national state agencies, oil companies and citizens contribute to explain the improvement of transparency in Arauca. In the late 2000s the government enacted regulations that penalised subnational governments (with the suspension of royalty transfers) when they failed to report information on the use of royalties or if subnational governments did not use the authorised bank account to manage royalties. Then in the early 2010s, the national government enacted a decree that made mandatory the publication of information about procurement processes through an online platform called SECOP. Furthermore, in 2013 the national government launched an online website – called Royalties Map – that provides detailed information, periodically updated, on each of the investment projects financed with royalties in Colombia.

Additionally, in 2006 a coalition of national oversight authorities (PGN and CGR), the national government, extractive companies and civil society organisations launched a strategy to increase transparency and oversight of royalties’ management in Arauca (La Voz del Cinaruco 2006). The strategy consisted on creating an oversight group – denominated Committee for Monitoring the Investment of Royalties (CSIR) – to monitor the use of royalties and publicize the results of their findings (González Espinosa 2009). Only until 2008 the CSIR become active when the World Bank, the state-owned oil company Ecopetrol and OXY agreed to fund its activities in Arauca (La Voz del Cinaruco 2008). The first years of operation for CSIR Arauca were not particularly easy. The subnational governments did not trust them and did not provide the data requested by CSIR Arauca. However, according to the last technical secretary of CSIR Arauca, after a few years the subnational governments started cooperating with information and interacting with citizens that performed oversight activities.

In conclusion, during most of the period of study, the transparency of government in Arauca, particularly regarding the management of oil revenues, was very low. Furthermore, the qualitative evidence shows that in some cases, between the mid-1980s and late 2000s, the mayoralties took advantage of the opacity to carry out irregular procedures. Finally, the Open Government Index, available since 2010, suggests that transparency of government’s activities recently improved in Arauca. However, its transparency level remained high only after 2012. This coincides with the implementation of different strategies by public entities, oil companies and citizens in the last decade that may have increased the transparency of Arauca’s government, particularly with regards to investment projects funded by oil revenues.

3.2 Competition in procurement processes

Public procurement processes are a key mechanism to maximize the use of government’s revenues; the basic aim of these processes is to obtain the best value for the resources deployed by governments. Hence, the quality of public procurement processes has a significant effect on the final cost of investment projects and on the overall impact of investment projects. One indicator of the quality of such processes is the competitiveness among potential contractors that participate by presenting bids. In this section I assess the evidence on the (lack of) effective competition among contractors in Arauca’s procurement processes.

There is evidence that between the late 1980s and early 2000s some of Arauca’s mayoralties bypassed procurement rules to avoid competitive bidding process and handpicked contractors that were politically loyal to the mayor. Municipal governments justified the direct selection of contractors without opening public bidding processes through two strategies. First, investment projects were partitioned into several contracts so that each contract did not surpass the threshold (contract value) that would trigger the obligation of carrying out a public bidding process (El Tiempo 2003a). For example, the State Council annulled nine contracts allocated by the fourth elected mayor (1995-1997) because the procurement was done through direct contracting despite of the fact that due to the nature of the works the project should have been subject to public and competitive tendering (CE 2012).

Second, mayoralties preferred to contract with non-for-profit civil society organisations instead of profit-oriented companies because the law authorised contracting the former directly when these organisations were qualified experts in the activities required by the contract. However, at least two mayors contracted civil society organisations that lacked the required expertise as an instrument to appoint other sub-contractors discretionally. The PGN dismissed the fifth elected mayor of Arauca (1998-2000) and banned her from occupying public posts for three years because she subscribed directly three contracts related to the development of a housing programme with an international organisation that had no experience in housing projects. The mayor directly selected the international organisation and then she chose the sub-contractors that would effectively carry out works (El Tiempo 2001, 2003b). Similarly, the sixth elected mayor (2001-2003) also contracted a civil society organisation with no prior experience on public works to pave roads in Arauca (CSJ 2009).

Furthermore, between the late 1980s and first half of the 2000s there were cases of collusion between the public officers in charge of conducting public bidding processes and the contractors (Carroll 2015, CE 2012, CSJ 2008, 2009, PGN 2005b). According to several interviewees, it was not infrequent that public officers and contractors jointly drafted terms of reference for public bidding processes. As a result, the terms of references included barriers of entry. Additionally, public officers and contractors sometimes agreed beforehand which companies would win each c ontract. For example, in 2000 two fuel suppliers submitted their proposals before the mayoralty had issued the public call for proposals and afterwards only their proposals were considered for awarding the contract. The PGN concluded that this was evidence that the process was rigged and fined the mayor (PGN 2005b). A similar situation took place in the following mayoralty as well: in at least three procurement processes the offer that won the bid had been submitted to the mayoralty before the call for offers was made (CSJ 2009). Additionally, the sixth elected mayor of Arauca (2001-2003) and several of his principal aides were condemned by criminal courts due to the rigging of several procurement processes in complicity with contractors (CSJ 2008, 2009). The courts found that the defendants coordinated the bids (to allocate the winners) and the distribution of anticipated payments of the contracts.

Between 2005 and 2015, Arauca’s municipal government predominantly used open public bidding processes to allocate public contracts (67% in value), instead of employing direct contracting processes (12% in value) (CCE 2017). Nevertheless, the open bidding processes (licitaciones públicas) were a mere formality rather than an instrument to promote competition among bidders. In 310 licitaciones públicas that took place between 2005 and 2015, the average number of offers per process was 1.05 and the highest average in a single year was 1.18 (Figure 2). There is very small variation in the yearly average number of bids per procurement process covered in this period (which covers three different mayors). Furthermore, there is only one observation in which three offers were submitted to the mayoralty of Arauca in an open public bidding process (and one of the offers was unqualified). Hence, in practice, the concurrence of bidders was extremely limited and there was almost no competition in a decade of open public bidding processes in Arauca.

Figure 2 – Average number of bids per open public tendering procurement processes in Arauca, 2005-2015


Source: Own calculations based on CCE (2017)

Reports from state agencies, the media and civil society organisations suggest that the lack of competition in open public bidding processes is a nation-wide problem. The Society of Colombian Engineers published data on open tendering processes in Colombian municipalities during 2014 and reported that only 61 (mostly capital cities) had an average number of bids per public bidding process that was equal or above to 2.0 (SCI 2015). The same report also concluded that the open public bidding processes carried out by departments received 3.3 bids on average in 2014 (in Arauca department the average was only 1.11).

A research solicited by the Colombian Chamber of Infrastructure (CCI) found that in 2014 public biddings of works linked to infrastructure on average received only 1.37 bids when conducted by municipalities and 4.48 when carried out by departments (Melendez 2015: 110). Furthermore, the study surveyed 390 companies that offered engineering services and found that only 14% of the respondents considered that procurement processes at the municipal level were transparent (Melendez 2015: 12).

It is plausible to conclude that the level of competition in Arauca’s open public bidding processes is lower than in the average Colombian municipality, at least with regards to its performance in the last years. The data published by SCI (2015) shows that the average number of bids per public bidding process in Arauca was below the municipal average of 2014. Furthermore, another study from the CCI found that in 2016, Arauca had the lowest average number of bids per open bidding process (1 bid) among the capitals of Colombian departments (El Espectador 2017).

In sum, the evidence assessed in this section indicates that competition in Arauca’s procurement processes was very low during the entire period of study. Procurement processes were not used to attract and select the most suitable contractors through competitive processes. Instead, it seems that senior staff and mayors frequently handpicked contractors based on their political allegiance. In that sense, the qualitative evidence suggests that the low concurrence of bidders and low competition in procurement processes was often a result of collusion between the top subnational government officials and contractors.

3.3 Effectiveness and efficiency to deliver outputs

This section analyses two aspects of the quality of PIM that are related with the completion of outputs by subnational governments. More specifically, the section measures the effectiveness of project delivery and the productive efficiency of the municipal government of Arauca. The analysis of these factors before 2005 relies on qualitative evidence, while the evaluation after 2005 is complemented with composite indexes that allow comparing Arauca with the average municipality in Colombia.

The biggest investment projects carried out by Arauca’s mayoralty during the late 1980s and 1990s were characterised by heavy cost over-runs and time delays (El Tiempo 1992, Carroll 2015). For example, the first mayoralty spent the equivalent of 32% of the total municipal income accrued in two years (1988-1989) in several sports and leisure venues (professional football stadium, sports coliseum, velodrome & artificial waves pool) that were finished almost a decade later (Castro Caycedo 2003, El Tiempo 1996). Furthermore, the final cost of the pool cost was twice the initial budget (El Tiempo 1996) and the cost overruns of the velodrome and the sports venues were also significant (El Tiempo 1997a).

In other cases of the late 1980s and early 2000s, the delivery of the works had a low quality or the contracted works were never finished or never carried out, despite that the contractor received part or all the funds (Castro Caycedo 2003, El Tiempo 1992, Semana 2003b, Carroll 2015). For example, the second elected mayor (1992-1994) contracted an architect to construct popular housing but by 2005 the work was still not completed because the municipality did not comply with its obligations (delivering basic materials for construction) (CE 2010). Furthermore, there were cases of gross waste of resources. For example, the second elected mayor (1990-1992) illegally hired 2,000 people to guard the construction of a river dyke, a task that should have been undertaken by its builder (CSJ 2005). In another case, the State Council found that the fourth elected mayor (1995-1997) contracted and paid to pave the same road twice (in two public works contracts with different contractors) (CE 2012).

From the mid-2000s onwards the record of Arauca seems more mixed if assessed with the composite indexes on government effectiveness and efficiency computed by the national government’s planning unit (DNP). Since 2005 the DNP has published a yearly index that evaluates the performance of municipal governments in Colombia. Two of its sub-components measure government’s efficacy and government’s relative efficiency (with respect to other municipal governments). The efficacy component assesses the completion of the target outputs in the municipality’s development plan in education, health, potable water, housing and agriculture, among others (DNP 2008). The results for Arauca show that between 2007 and 2010 the efficacy of the municipality plummeted to critical levels and that Arauca’s score was below the average municipality until 2013 (Figure 3).

Figure 3 – DNP’s index on municipal government’s efficacy in Arauca and national average, 2005-2015

Source: DNP (2015, 2016)

The efficiency component of DNP’s performance index measures the relative efficiency of governments applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) (DNP 2008). DEA involves setting an optimization model that allows measuring relative efficiency in terms of the usage of inputs and the generation of outputs by decision-making units (Cook, Seiford 2009, Herrera, Pang 2005). To calculate the index, the DNP measured different types of outputs in education (e.g. number of students), health (e.g. number of children vaccinates) and potable water (e.g. number of users) (DNP 2008). These three sectors coincide with the areas ear-marked by the law for royalties between 1994 and 2011. The inputs considered in the production functions included financial resources invested, human resources (e.g. number of teachers, infrastructure resources (e.g. square meters of school lecture rooms) and other materials (e.g. vaccination dozes).

In contrast with Arauca’s efficacy measurement, the DNP’s measurement of the municipal government’s efficiency suggests that the municipality improved in the last decade and that it performed better than the average municipality between 2007 and 2015 (Figure 4). However, since 2005 Arauca only managed to achieve levels of efficiency in or above the “satisfactory” level in only two years, 2011 and 2015.

Figure 4 – DNP’s index on municipal government’s efficiency in Arauca and national average, 2005-2015

Source: DNP (2015, 2016)

Finally, the DNP recently launched an index to measure the performance of subnational governments with respect to the management of royalties (DNP 2017). It is a composite index that aggregates the weighted average of four components: transparency (20%, reports to the national government), compliance with legal requirements (20%), efficiency (40%, progress in project implementation) and effectiveness (20%, completion of projects and targets). The score of Arauca between the first measurement (IV quarter of 2015) and the last measurement (IV quarter 2016) has been quite volatile, but the tendency shows a decrease in its recent performance (Figure 5).


Figure 5 – DNP’s index on performance in the management of royalties in Arauca and national average, 2015-2016
Source: DNP (2017)

In summary, Arauca’s investment effectiveness and efficiency appear to have been low in the first two decades after the oil boom started according to qualitative evidence. Between 2005 and 2015, the evolution of these two components is mixed: the effectiveness was quite volatile and with average scores below the national average in six out of eleven years of the period and the efficiency improved steadily during the whole period and remained above the national average.


Conclusions

Before the 1980s Arauca was a marginal municipality located in the border of Colombia that had little experience in public investment management due to the shortage of resources and the centralisation of government. The state and the civil society were weak and non-state armed groups defied the state’s monopoly of force.

In this context, since the mid-1980s, the municipal government received an oil-driven fiscal windfall. A couple of interviewees compared Arauca’s situation to that of a person that wins the lottery and wakes up millionaire, with no prior experience in managing wealth. The oil revenues accrued by Arauca were vast but volatile; the municipality remained very dependent on oil as its main source of income; and, during the almost two decades the royalty system did not ensure the transparency in the flow of resources.

Oil rich governments require developing strong institutions to manage fiscal windfalls and to address the problems associated with an oil bonanza (e.g. high influx of economic migrants) (Ross 2012). The mediocre performance of Arauca’s municipal government with regards to the management of oil royalties implicates that it was not able to build such institutions during the period of study.

To assess the quality of PIM in Arauca between 1985 and 2015, the paper analysed qualitative and quantitative data on four aspects of the implementation of investment projects: the transparency of government, the competition in procurement processes, and the effectiveness and efficiency of government investment procedures. The evidence suggests that the subnational government of Arauca failed at building a strong PIM capacity: the four indicators of PIM quality remained low during most of the period of study and only two of the indicators (efficiency and transparency) presented some progress in the last years.

The shortcomings with the efficacy of public expenditures and procurement processes in Arauca are consistent with the research of Perry, García et al. (2015: 7) who found a negative and significant association between royalties per capita and “the stock of physical and human assets dedicated to dedicated to basic public services’ provision” in Colombian municipalities. Overall, the evidence presented in this paper showed that a resource subnational government was not able to develop strong processes and institutional arrangements to invest oil revenues.

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