Chile is a Politically Disunited Resource Exporter
The most affluent Latin American country's economic success owes more to mineral exports than market reforms. Irreconcilable political divides show it has not found a model for future success.
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With a population of nearly 20 million people, mid-sized Chile is the second-most affluent country in Latin America as measured by GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity—at roughly $31,000, it is surpassed only by tiny Panama, and close to twice as affluent as Brazil.1 Over the last four decades, Chile has also seen some of the highest rates of economic growth in Latin America. Chilean GDP per capita increased by an estimated 162% from 1990 to 2021, compared to 52% for Argentina, 40% for Brazil, and just 24% for Mexico.2 In 1990, Chile was significantly poorer than any of these countries, but with economic growth more comparable to Poland or Morocco, it has since overtaken them all. The country’s growth streak began under the rule of Chilean president and military dictator Augusto Pinochet. But, in 2022, the country decisively voted in 38-year-old Gabriel Boric as president, a prominent student activist leader who pledged to make Chile the “grave” of “neoliberalism” i.e. Pinochet’s market liberal reforms, which were relatively unique for Latin America.3
Chile has failed to industrialize: the country’s economic growth was not powered by industrialization, but by rising exports of valuable minerals like copper and lithium, especially to an industrializing China. Today, Chile resembles a more successful version of its neighbors: like Brazil, rather than industry it instead depends on resource exports to Asia, including agricultural exports.4 Chile’s economic growth began to stall in 2014 and has not regained its former strength since, indicating that the country has largely used up its potential for catch-up growth and its economic model is increasingly inadequate to drive further development.5 Mining remains the only internationally relevant economic activity in Chile.
Since even before Pinochet’s death in 2006, Chile has been slowly reverting to a more typical South American norm of low trust in politics and large shifts in official policy depending on the results of highly contested elections.6 Despite a streak of relatively high economic growth, the politically ascendant educated Chilean elites in the universities, media, judiciary, and civil service have not developed a fondness for laissez-faire market liberalism, but rather subscribe to socially and economically interventionist ideas fashionable in the wider Western world. These ideas also give them the justifications to exert control over Chile’s lucrative mining industry, which has become increasingly dominated by foreign corporations since the end of Pinochet’s rule in 1990.
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The Chilean Economy is Based on Exporting Valuable Minerals
Chile’s economic success has been driven primarily by copper exports. Copper is a metal used in a wide variety of applications in industry, construction, and agriculture, but especially in electrical wiring thanks to its excellent conductive properties. Chile is the world’s largest copper producer, with an approximate 25% share of global copper production.7 No other country has more than a 10% market share; neighboring Peru is the closest. Its main export destination is China, itself a major copper producer. Around 40% of Chile’s exports are for the Chinese market.8 China’s need for raw materials has led it to become the leading trade partner across South America.9
The global growth of wind and solar power has ensured continued growth in demand for copper, which is especially necessary for solar photovoltaic panels.10 Global copper demand is forecast to double by 2035.11 The growth of the electric vehicle industry has also bolstered demand for Chile’s mining exports. Chile is also the world’s second-largest producer of lithium, behind only Australia in production volumes.12 It holds around a 30% market share.13 Lithium is intensively utilized in batteries for cars and grid-scale energy storage. Chile also mines around one fifth of the world’s molybdenum, which is used primarily to make high-strength steel alloys, as well as smaller amounts of gold and silver.
Between copper, lithium, and the other minerals, mining is almost 60% of Chilean exports.14 This figure has barely changed over the last forty years: in 1980, mining’s share of exports was 54%.15 Moreover, much of the rest of Chile’s exports are not manufactured goods, but agricultural products like wine and fish. Combined, natural resource exports represented at least 85% of Chilean exports in 2023.16 For comparison, oil was 74% of Saudi Arabian exports in 2021.17 Like Saudi Arabia, Chile’s international economic relevance is tied to uniquely vast exports of extracted natural resources.
In the 1990s, the mining industry’s rapid growth powered GDP growth of around 7.5% a year, as copper production rose from 1.3 million metric tons in 1985 to 5.4 million tons in 2004.18 Annual national copper production has been stagnant since then—just 5.3 million tons in 2023—as the mines required ever more investment to extract harder-to-access ore. But Chile benefited in the early 2000s from the global commodities boom, driven in part by the growth of Chinese industry. Copper prices almost quadrupled in nominal terms between 2000 and 2004, and although they declined again after 2012, prices have risen again to historic highs in recent years, driven in part by the renewable energy sector.19
Nearly all of Chile’s increased copper production since the 1980s has come from privately-owned companies: the growth in the state-owned Codelco’s output was very modest.20 Codelco today produces around 30% of the country’s total copper, at approximately 1.35 million tons per year.21 The largest foreign mining corporations are also well-represented in Chile. Australia’s BHP Group controls the country’s single largest mine, the Escondida mine in the Atacama Desert in the north of the country.22 London-based Anglo American, operating in a consortium with Mitsubishi and other Japanese firms, operates the Los Bronces mine in central Chile and the Collahuasi mine in the north.23 Geographically, Chile’s territory narrowly snakes down the western coast of South America: the dry and mountainous north of the country is the mining region, while the fertile south is agricultural, and the capital city of Santiago—where roughly one third of the population lives—sits in-between.
The largest domestic private company in the copper mining industry is London-headquartered Antofagasta plc. The company is publicly-listed on the London Stock Exchange, but is majority-controlled by the Luksic family, a Chilean family of Croatian ethnic origin who own a large conglomerate, of which Antofagasta is a part. Antofagasta is majority owner of the Los Pelambres mine in the Coquimbo region in north-central Chile, with 40% ownership held by a consortium of Japanese firms.24 The company’s other mines are mostly located in the Antofagasta region in the north that the company is named after. It is also the majority owner of the Centinela mining complex and the Antucoya mine; the minority owner in both cases is the Japanese Marubeni Corporation, a trading company.25 In 2023, the company produced 660,000 tons of copper and generated $3 billion of earnings from $6.3 billion of revenue.26 The Luksic family is the wealthiest family not just in Chile, but in all of South America, with a combined wealth of approximately $25 billion.27
Overall, Chile’s mining industry today seems to be dominated by foreign rather than domestic mining companies. In 2021, Codelco and Antofagasta together mined a little bit less than half of Chile’s copper that year; the latter is, however, headquartered in London despite being run by Chileans.28 Industry publications list all of the other major mining companies in Chile as foreign: in addition to BHP and Anglo American, there is the Anglo-Australian company Rio Tinto, the U.S. company Freeport-McMoRan, and other Canadian, Japanese, and even Polish mining companies.29 The Chilean economist and anti-corporate activist Julián Alcayaga Olivares claimed that, in 2019, foreign companies mined 70% of Chilean copper.30
While the legal regime for copper mining appears to be stable, at least for now, the Chilean state is beginning to involve itself to a greater degree in lithium mining. Lithium mining was nationalized in 1971, leading to the formation of Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM). The state-owned miner was privatized in 1986, with ownership transferred to Julio Ponce Lerou, Pinochet’s son-in-law.31 The privatized SQM, however, did not benefit from the same indefinite concessions that the private copper mine operators received under Pinochet’s administration: its current concession expires in 2030.32
In 2023, President Gabriel Boric announced that the state would mandate public-private partnerships for lithium extraction, and in January 2024, SQM announced that it would transfer its concession rights to a joint venture with the state-owned copper mining company Codelco, in which Codelco held majority ownership on a “50% plus one” model.33 Given that its concession was due to expire in six years anyway, the company had little choice. The public-private partnership model, however, does preserve private interests in Chilean lithium mining and is far less radical than the large-scale nationalization of lithium resources put through by Mexico’s President Lopez Obrador in 2022.
Pinochet Failed to Create a New Chile
From 1973 until 1990, Chile was ruled by Augusto Pinochet, an army general who took power in a military coup amidst a severe economic crisis caused by the profligate and hyperinflationary economic policies of the administration of President Salvador Allende, often called the first Marxist to be freely elected head of state in a Latin American democracy.34 Pinochet wanted to move the country in an anti-communist direction. He elevated a number of Chileans who had studied economics in the United States to high government offices. These “Chicago Boys,” so called because many studied under the Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, helped enact market liberal economic reforms, including privatizing most state-owned enterprises, creating a voucher system for schooling, partially privatizing pensions, and establishing a mixed public-private insurance model in healthcare.
Pinochet’s administration did not implement the tenets of market liberalism with unusual fervor or insight. For one, although Pinochet sold off nearly all of Chile’s state-owned enterprises, many of these were nationalized only recently in the first place, back then, by Salvador Allende’s brief and economically disastrous administration from 1970 to 1973. Moreover, it was often Pinochet’s close allies who bought the enterprises, at discounted prices—including his own son-in-law—in a pattern not too different from the formation of economic elites in Mexico’s static and extractive economy. This is enough to explain why, under Pinochet, there was no significant industrialization in Chile: the country’s key economic institutions were handed to politically-connected insiders, not live players.
The market liberal reforms implemented by “Chicago Boys” such as labor minister José Piñera were not radical by the standards of developed liberal democracies. Education and healthcare were partly privatized, but Piñera’s signature reform was to the pension system, switching most people from a government-run “pay as you go” system to a U.S.-style system of privately-managed individual accounts, like a 401k.35 The Chilean central bank was granted its full independence in 1989.36 The Copper Stabilization Fund, introduced in 1989, functioned as a sovereign wealth fund, saving some of the revenue from the mining sector.37
This was not an ambitious and cutting-edge experiment in free market economics, but rather an imitation of U.S. norms on government intervention in the economy: whereas the European or Latin American norm might be to create new government bureaucracies tasked with directly enforcing new regulations and laws, the U.S. norm is to make government intervention indirect by interfacing through or incentivizing private companies to implement the desired policy. The primary purpose of these reforms was not to innovate in governance, but to make a return to profligate Allende-style socialism impossible by, in Pinochet’s words, making Chile into “a country of proprietors, not proletarians.”38
This aim is not dissimilar to the societal reforms undertaken by the Polish government in the aftermath of communism, which also aimed to turn Poland into a society of middle-class small businesspeople and prevent a return to communism. In Poland, these reforms worked for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, Poland underwent a genuine regime change as the previous communist elites were replaced by the anti-communist activists who had agitated against them for years. Poland was also already an industrialized society under communism, so economic reform took the form of privatizing and breaking up big state-owned enterprises, rather than having to build them from scratch. Poland’s proximity to German industry, to which it became a key low-cost trade partner, also helped.
In Pinochet’s Chile, preventing a return to communism was the same motivation for handing control of key economic institutions to political allies and for the severe extrajudicial repression Pinochet undertook during his rule, including executing or “forcibly disappearing” thousands of perceived political enemies. But Pinochet did not build a strong, educated, anti-communist elite faction of his own that could outlast his personal rule, nor did he succeed in building new functional economic institutions that could drive industrialization. Although economic inequality in Chile has fallen in the last few decades, as of 2022 the country still ranked at roughly African levels of income inequality; a stark contrast to Poland, which is one of the most economically egalitarian societies in the world.39
The Concertación, a coalition of nominally center-left parties that governed from 1990 to 2010, largely followed Pinochet’s principles. The state ran fiscal surpluses in 14 out of 21 years through to 2010.40 In 2013, debt was just 13% of GDP, and although it has risen substantially since, up to 37% of GDP, this is still one of the lowest ratios in South America. Pinochet himself remained in office as head of the armed forces until 1998, and his political power in the 1990s was bolstered by his constitutionally-protected right to designate eight senators, which effectively granted him a veto in Chile’s upper house. Moreover, the president had no authority to remove the head of the armed forces from office.
Pinochet’s post-dictatorship power was slowly destroyed through judicial processes. Patricio Aylwin, Pinochet’s democratically-elected successor and a law professor by career, launched a “truth and reconciliation” process that investigated the extrajudicial kidnappings and killings of Pinochet’s administration. Based on these findings, in 1998, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón issued an international arrest warrant for Pinochet for allegedly torturing and killing Spanish citizens. Pinochet was arrested and held in the United Kingdom, while visiting for medical treatment, before eventually being released back to Chile. Despite the Chilean parliament voting to give Pinochet legal immunity, the Supreme Court of Chile lifted it and, in 2000, Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia prosecuted Pinochet for human rights violations. In 2005, a constitutional reform abolished Pinochet’s remaining privileges; Pinochet was almost 90 years old and would be dead a year later.41
A 2015 electoral reform has proved to be another key factor in the fragmentation of Chilean politics. Pinochet had installed an unusual “binomial” electoral system, used from 1989 onwards. Every constituency elected two members to the National Congress, and to win both seats, a party had to win double the votes of the second-placed party. If no party did so, the top two parties each got one seat. The system encouraged broad coalitions and effectively locked small parties out of power, in a manner quite similar to the first-past-the-post system used in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.42
The 2015 reform, in contrast, increased the number of members of both the upper and lower houses while also allocating seats on the basis of partial proportional representation.43 The result is that the current government is composed of two different coalitions, made up of a total of twelve different political parties. A member of the Communist Party is now President of the House of Deputies, and the traditional center-right and center-left parties that dominated the post-Pinochet era have been marginalized.44
Chile’s Educated Elites Do Not Favor Free Markets in Mining
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As in other non-industrialized or deindustrializing but culturally Western countries, universities in Chile have continued producing credentialed elites with high ambitions from the aspirational middle class, despite the lack of well-paying and productive jobs for them to fill. The result is a natural and powerful constituency for political change that will result in prestigious and well-paying positions for these newly-minted elites, whether or not they are economically productive. According to the OECD, just over 40% of Chileans aged 25 to 34 years old have completed tertiary education.45 This is comparable to Finland or Germany and far higher than Chile’s neighbors Brazil, at 23%, or Argentina, at 19%. As Pinochet’s political settlement has withered away, the power of these educated elites in universities, the media, the civil service, and the judiciary has only grown.
In 2011, student riots, at the time the largest protests since the end of Pinochet’s rule, demanded higher state funding for universities and an end to profit-making educational institutions. A key leader in the student protests was now-president Gabriel Boric, in his role as President of the University of Chile Student Federation.46 The protests took place during the country’s first elected conservative government since 1958. In 2019, another series of mass protests broke out, focused on the capital, Santiago, a movement known as the Estallido Social, or “social outburst.” The protests escalated into rioting and the burning of metro stations.
A state of emergency was declared and the Chilean Army was deployed on the streets to restore order. A week later, a protest with participants numbering over a million took place in Santiago. By the end of the year several thousand people had been arrested in the riots and 29 had died.47 The protests eventually came to an end in March 2020 due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the imposition of lockdown measures, but not before the National Congress agreed to hold a referendum on rewriting the constitution, which had been revised on several occasions but not fundamentally changed from the version that Pinochet promulgated in 1980.
A year later, Chileans decisively elected Gabriel Boric president, then voted in favor of revising the constitution. Unlike Brazil or Mexico, which are many times larger than Chile while also being much more decentralized, Chile is relatively centralized despite having low state capacity, which means electoral victories can be much more easily used to accomplish specific political or policy objectives. A constitutional committee was elected, with a membership largely composed of the political left. The committee authored a radical draft constitution. The text redefined Chile as a plurinational state, made up of the Chilean state and the indigenous communities, who were to be granted extensive rights of consultation and consent over any economic projects taking place within their traditional territories, as well as the right to self-government. The draft also gave new obligations to the government, such as the obligation to prevent climate change and promote environmental education.
It also sought to end the market liberal tendencies bequeathed by Pinochet by establishing universal rights to water, food, healthcare, education, and energy, phrased in such a way as to mandate the extensive and direct involvement of the state in all of these sectors. The constitution would have also guaranteed unrestricted access to abortion, obliged the state to promote national cuisine and establish regional media, and guaranteed “neurodivergent persons their right to an autonomous life,” among other points from the leading edge of modern political fashion.48
Although this constitution was rejected in a referendum held in September 2022, by a margin of 62% to 38%, it is representative of the ideological and political goals of Chile’s educated elites.49 The environmentalist movement is particularly influential amongst Chile’s youth, a surprisingly high 40% of whom reported personally participating in environmental protests between 2011 and 2016.50
The popularity of such views is partially because they indirectly promise to reassert control of Chile’s most valuable national asset, its mining industry, from foreign corporations back to the Chilean government and the educated Chileans who staff it. Chilean mining still has considerable room for expansion as global demand rises. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the country has a century of proven reserves of copper at current production rates.51 Regulatory action has significantly slowed the expansion of the mining sector over the last decade, with most of the issues linked to environmental permitting.
Six mining projects were blocked in the first half of 2022 alone, including Anglo American’s application to expand operations at Los Bronces, one of the company’s largest mines. High-grade ore at Los Bronces is increasingly exhausted within the existing workings and the expansion would have allowed the company to access new high-grade ore from deeper underground. Despite ten years of environmental studies and $3 billion in planned investments, the application failed on public health grounds.52 A year later the company received permission to proceed from a committee of ministers, overturning the regulator’s verdict, but examples like this highlight the increased unpredictability of the Chilean permitting process and the growing length of delays, which drive up overall costs and lower the viability of more economically marginal projects.53
Andes Iron, a domestically-owned and politically well-connected firm that was part-owned by former President Sebastian Piñera—brother of Pinochet’s “Chicago Boy” José Piñera—has found its Dominga iron and copper mining and port construction project blocked on environmental grounds by the incumbent government.54 In 2014, the Chilean Supreme Court blocked the development of the El Morro gold mine on the grounds that the local indigenous community had been insufficiently consulted. As of 2024, the project—now combined with an undeveloped copper mine—is still not in production. Delays in the permitting process have now driven average mining project timescale overruns to upwards of four years.55
Copper smelting and concentration are highly energy and water-intensive processes, as is lithium pumping. Traditionally, the industry has relied on fresh water supplies from reservoirs, but in response to a long drought that began in 2010, the mining industry has shifted towards the use of seawater. Desalination plant capacity has rapidly increased with 22 plants built since 2008 and another nine in development: capacity is likely to more than double within the next five years.56 These desalination plants almost exclusively service the mining industry, but add considerably to their electricity costs, which are already high due to the demands of copper concentration. Mining already consumes around a quarter of the country’s total electricity generation.57
Chilean electricity production is highly dependent on hydrocarbons and hydroelectric power. Hydropower generates a little over 20% of all electricity produced, while coal and natural gas plants produce over 40% combined. Solar power generates a 16% share as of 2022.58 The growth of all generation sources other than solar and wind, however, is severely politically constrained. Chile has passed a legally binding Net Zero commitment by 2050.59 Eight coal plants were shut down in just three years between 2019 and 2022, and all the remaining plants are all planned to cease operations by 2030.60
Hydroelectricity output is limited by both the long-term drought and by the failure to add new large-scale generation capacity. The HidroAysén megaproject, which aimed to build five new large river plants in Patagonia, would have added another 18 TWh annually to the country’s generating capacity, almost 70% of the mining industry’s current electricity demand.61 The project was canceled in 2014 after a series of protests and appeals from environmentalist groups.62 Electricity prices are already the highest in the region and it is likely that the decision to rely solely on hydropower, wind, and solar going forward will increase them further due to the high costs of transmitting electricity from favorable generation sites to the major demand centers and the burden of managing the inherent intermittency of wind and solar. But so long as the mining industry is mostly foreign-owned, this is perhaps a feature, not a bug, of the policies of educated Chilean elites.
In the Shadow of the United States
Chile’s political lurches of the last half-century are, in large part, the results of ineffectively attempting to increase the country’s ideological, economic, and geopolitical autonomy from the United States, by far the dominant economic and military power in the Western Hemisphere. The most important arena of conflict here is Chile’s natural bounty of valuable minerals, especially copper. When Salvador Allende took office in 1970, Chile’s copper industry was run by U.S. mining companies. His forcible nationalization of the copper industry—paying reduced compensation to the U.S. companies on the grounds that they had improperly profited from Chile—was not a move motivated only by socialist ideology, but was also rather widely supported in Chile on nationalist grounds.63 Even after Pinochet overthrew Allende, he pointedly did not privatize Codelco.
Pinochet’s 1980 constitution established that the state holds all rights to all mines within its territory, but subsequently, under Pinochet’s tenure, a system of “full concessions” was established that allowed for private ownership of mines in all but name.64 Nonetheless, it was only after Pinochet left the presidency that foreign mining companies came to dominate Chilean mining again. According to the Chilean economist and anti-corporate activist Julián Alcayaga Olivares, only 13% of Chilean copper was produced by foreign companies in 1989, at the end of Pinochet’s rule, but that share grew to 70% by 2019.65 The constitutional revision assembly which produced the failed 2022 constitution considered, but ultimately rejected, a clause that would have imposed mandatory state majority ownership on the copper mining industry as well.66
From Saudi Arabia to Nigeria to Russia to Norway, the governments of countries where profitable resource extraction makes up a large portion of national income work hard to ensure that control of resource profits is centralized then carefully distributed outwards to maintain the strength and autonomy of the domestic government. If measuring by the proportion of Chilean mining undertaken by Chilean companies, both Allende and Pinochet appear to have been roughly equally nationalist, while the period before and after either roughly equally not.
In terms of foreign allegiances, Allende notably tried to move Chile away from alignment with the U.S. Under Allende in 1971, Chile was the second major Latin American country to join the Non-Aligned Movement, after only communist Cuba. Allende tried to build up diplomatic and economic relations with the Soviet Union, denounced the U.S.-headquartered Organization of American States, and wanted to create a more integrated bloc of Latin American nations to counterbalance the U.S.67 Washington supported the market liberalism of Pinochet’s Chile, but not the authoritarianism, and began diplomatically, politically, and financially pressuring Pinochet to transition to civilian rule and democracy as early as 1984.68 In the end, it was Spanish judges and British police who broke norms of international law to first arrest Pinochet. In other words, both Allende and Pinochet were also roughly equally misaligned with the U.S. and its allies.
The enduring appeal of redistributive politics in Latin America, whether in the moderate form as in Brazil or Chile or in the extreme form as in Venezuela, is that it offers a convenient method of asserting the power of domestic educated elites over the domestic business class and, more importantly, over foreign corporations run by “Yankees.” The problem is that although such politics allow domestic elites to seize control of the nation’s economic resources, they also incentivize incompetent and self-destructive economic redistribution of said resources that lead to immiseration and political instability.
In the end, the primary political effect of market reforms in Chile was to bring foreign mining companies back to the country and, alongside them, mint some new private Chilean business elites. It is unclear that even this would have occurred had China not embarked on an unprecedented economic rise starting in the 1980s and provided the vast and necessary demand for copper and other minerals. It was the authoritarianism of Pinochet, not his market liberalism, that had suppressed socialism in Chile.
By failing to industrialize Chile and thus recuperate the demographics who otherwise form the natural constituency for economically redistributive politics, Pinochet’s strain of market liberalism backed by military authoritarianism simply failed to provide an alternative path to sovereignty and development for Chile. The contemporary strain of environmentalist progressivism popular among Chile’s youth does not offer a path to development, but promises to, at least, assert their power over their domestic and foreign political opponents. This will ensure its appeal continues to endure, but it will also mean Chile, like the rest of Latin America, will remain mostly irrelevant in global economic, technological, or military developments.
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According to the World Bank. See here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true
According to Our World in Data. See here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=chart&stackMode=relative&country=CHL~BRA~ARG~URY~PER~BOL~PRY~COL~MEX~PAN~MAR~VNM~POL~GUY~ECU~TUR
Fabian Cambero, “Former protest leader Boric seeks to bury Chile's 'neoliberal' past,” Reuters, November 17, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/former-protest-leader-boric-seeks-bury-chiles-neoliberal-past-2021-11-17/
Solimano, Andrés; Zapata-Román, Gabriela (2019) : Structural transformations and the lack of inclusive growth: The case of Chile, WIDER Working Paper, No. 2019/118, ISBN 978-92-9256-754-5, The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Helsinki, https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2019/754-5. URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/229221/1/wp2019-118.pdf
According to the BTI Atlas. See here: https://bti-project.org/en/reports/country-report/CHL#pos7
According to the U.S. International Trade Administration. See here: https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/chile-mining
According to the World Bank’s World Integrated Trade Solution database. See here: https://wits.worldbank.org/CountrySnapshot/en/CHL/textview
According to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. See here: https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/china-regional-snapshot-south-america/
Konrad J. A. Kundig et al., “Market Study: Current and Projected Wind and Solar Renewable Electric Generating Capacity and Resulting Copper Demand,” Copper Development Association, July 20, 2011, https://copper.org/environment/sustainable-energy/renewables/education/Projected-wind-solar-copper-demand.pdf
“Chile and Peru’s copper for energy transition,” S&P Global Market Intelligence, April 5, 2023, https://www.spglobal.com/esg/insights/featured/special-editorial/chile-and-peru-s-copper-for-energy-transition
Vincent Bos, Forget Marie, and Yann Gunzburger. Lithium-based energy transition through Chilean and Australian miningscapes. The Extractive Industries and Society, Vol. 17, March 2024, 101384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2023.101384
Katie Brigham, “How Chile is shaping the global market for lithium, a vital component of EV batteries,” CNBC, May 6, 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/06/chile-state-led-lithium-policy-central-to-future-of-electric-vehicles.html
“The Chilean Economy at a Glance,” Central Bank of Chile, April 2023, https://www.bcentral.cl/documents/33528/42286/fundamentals_ing_mar_23.pdf
According to TradingEconomics. See here: https://tradingeconomics.com/chile/exports-by-category
Eduardo Aninat, “Chile in the 1990s: Embracing Development Opportunities,” Finance & Development, March 2000, Vol. 37, No. 1, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/aninat.htm; Diego Hernandez, “Can Chilean Copper Maintain Its World Market Share?”, BHPBilliton, 2005, https://www.bhp.com/-/media/bhp/documents/investors/reports/2005/crupresentationapril2005dhernandez.pdf
According to MacroTrends. See here: https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-chart-data
“The rollercoaster ride of Chile's copper mining industry,” bnamericas, April 1, 2024, https://www.bnamericas.com/en/interviews/the-rollercoaster-ride-of-chiles-copper-mining-industry
“Chile's Codelco posts 2023 profit dip as production falls,” Reuters, March 29, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/chiles-codelco-posts-2023-profit-dip-production-falls-2024-03-29/
According to BHP. See here: https://www.bhp.com/what-we-do/global-locations/chile/escondida
According to Anglo American. See here: https://www.angloamerican.com/products/copper
According to Mining Data Online. See here: https://miningdataonline.com/property/176/Los-Pelambres-Mine.aspx
According to Marubeni. See here: https://www.marubeni.com/en/business/metal_mineral_resources/
According to Antofagasta plc’s 2023 annual results. See here: https://www.antofagasta.co.uk/media/4607/20240220_anto-fy-results-2023-feb24-vf.pdf
Daniel Cancel and Eduardo Thomson, “Richest Family in South America Doubled Its Fortune on an Investment Analysts Hated,” Bloomberg, September 22, 2023, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-22/billionaire-luksic-family-doubles-fortune-on-hapag-lloyd-investment
“Copper production in Chile and major projects,” Mining Technology, July 4, 2023, https://www.mining-technology.com/data-insights/copper-in-chile/
Jorge Molina excerpting Julián Alcayaga, “The transnational plunder of Chilean copper,” Pressenza, February 8, 2022, https://www.pressenza.com/2022/02/the-transnational-plunder-of-chilean-copper/
Blake Schmidt and James Attwood, “Lithium King Crowned in Dictatorship Sees $3.5 Billion Fortune at Risk,” Bloomberg, June 23, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-23/lithium-king-crowned-in-dictatorship-sees-3-5-billion-fortune-at-risk
“Chile’s plan for state control in lithium dismays business,” CNBC, April 22, 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/22/chiles-plan-for-state-control-in-lithium-dismays-business.html
“Chile: SQM will transfer lithium concessions to a joint venture with Codelco,” America economia, March 21, 2024, https://www.americaeconomia.com/en/node/286192
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According to the OECD. See here: https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/population-with-tertiary-education.htm
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See Chile’s constitution here: https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Chile_2022D
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According to the U.S. Geological Survey. See here: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2024/mcs2024-copper.pdf
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According to the Chilean government. See here: https://www.cochilco.cl/Listado%20Temtico/Proyecci%C3%B3n%20Consumo%20EE%202022-2033%20Final%20con%20rpi.pdf
According to the International Energy Agency. See here: https://www.iea.org/countries/chile
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