The governments of Colombia and Peru have had to respond to different economic and political priorities during the last three decades. Those countries register high rates of economic growth but they also have to address situations of political violence. Some studies have pointed out that governments in this region are not evaluated based on economic performance, but on violence and poverty. By contrast, this paper shows that, although important differences are present between these two countries, economic performance, in particular in the fields of unemployment and inflation has significant effects on the public evaluation of governments. It does so by conducting vectors autoregressive analysis of public opinion data in these countries in the period 1994-2012 (Colombia) and 1985—2012 (Peru).
