Creative approaches to monitor the impact of economic crises in Colombia

The main goal of this document is to develop alternative indicators to gauge how Colombian households respond to economic crises. The development of these indicators contributes to the World Bank s initiative to create easily updatable databases which include variables that may help to anticipate future episodes of economic downturn. In this sense, the World Bank has developed a series of activities to monitor the impacts of the global financial crisis on human development indicators, and to guide policy and program responses. The activities aim at forecasting, simulating or anticipating future impacts and at monitoring them as they unfold. They are intended to generate information on the social impact of the crisis now, by using existing data or producing estimates based on simulations when data are not available. Ultimately they are intended to support client countries to strengthen their own capacity to measure and monitor social indicators.