ABSTRACT
Stretching from the Antarctic region to the eighteenth parallel and covering 756,950 km2 Chile is the seventh largest country in Latin America. It is populated by 16 million people with a high degree of ethnic homogeneity, given that 95 percent of the population is of “White or White-Amerindian” parentage. With US$4,408 of per capita GDP, it is the richest country in the region, excluding Trinidad and Tobago and other small-sized countries of the Caribbean. After the PPP adjustment, the above figure reaches US$11,200, making Chile the second richest Latin American country after Argentina. The same ranking emerges from the Human Development Index. The distribution of such income is extremely uneven: the Gini index is 0.571 while the ratio of the income accrued by the richest 20 percent of the population to that accrued by the poorest 20 percent is 18.7. Such high values are not exceptional within Latin America. However, they are exceptionally high on a global level. Only a handful of African countries present higher values. Chile is thus one of the most uneven countries on the planet. From the sectoral distribution of the GDP (primary 9 percent, secondary 34 percent, tertiary 57 percent) one can see that Chile stands in the middle between rural pre-industrial countries with dominating primary sectors and post-industrial ones where services typically account for more than 60 percent of the GDP while the primary sector is below 3 percent.
