EQUILIBRIO ECONÓMICO Y LA CONTRATACIÓN PÚBLICA EN COLOMBIA.

The public contracting in Colombia is conflicting and inefficient. It frequently leads to the patrimonial damage to the State. Colombian legal system can not assure the efficient and transparent public contracting. The cause is the institutional environment characterized by high transaction costs. The Colombian law makes things worse by recognizing the principle of economic equilibrium of the public contracts. This principle augments the contract incompleteness and makes impossible the use of the economic incentives to control the opportunism of the economic agents. The authors present the hypothesis that the economic equilibrium principle increases the conflictive nature of the public contracting. They make the empirical test of the hypothesis. The first section of the paper presents the summary of the literature on the transaction costs economics, as well as the legal literature on the historical origin and the content of the economic equilibrium principle. The second section describes the methodology of the empirical study. The third section shows the empirical evidence of the effects that the economic equilibrium principle exerts over the public contracting. The last section presents the conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]