Estudio sobre el tránsito de los productos farmacéuticos de bienes excluidos a bienes exentos de IVA

Abstract

In the 2019, the national government modified the Value Added Tax treatment that medicines had, moving them from the excluded regime in which they have been since 1991 to the exempt regime. This change was made in order to eliminate one of the competitive barriers that domestic producers were facing in relation to imported products.

Being in the excluded regime, domestic producers were not entitled to a refund of VAT paid for their intermediate consumption, which imposed a cost on them that medicine importing companies did not have to bear. This disadvantageous situation also coincided with the period of the Colombian economic opening, and it deepened as import tariffs on these products were reduced.

In this study we made an estimate of the additional cost that local producers were assuming under the excluded regime. The calculation obtained shows that local producers were not competing in the same conditions as importing companies.