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The Chilean water model has been described as a textbook example of a successful free water market system. This paper analyses water-rights transactions to determine how this water market has behaved in the northern Atacama Desert. It questions the neoliberal assumption that Chile’s unregulated water market has acted as an active tool to reallocate water towards uses that provide the highest economic value. Instead, it argues that the state is the central actor in water allocation. This problematizes the notion that the Chilean water model is one of the most unregulated in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The economic valuation of cultural heritage is an area of increasing interest and an important research topic in the emerging field of cultural economics. Many services and values associated with cultural heritage are not traded in markets, and their estimation requires methods developed for the valuation of non-market goods, such as those used in environmental economics. This paper applies the contingent valuation method with double dichotomous choice to estimate the value of historical sites in the city of Valdivia, Chile. The valuation exercise was implemented by designing a hypothetical guided walking tour to a cluster of historical sites in the city centre, and surveying tourists visiting the city during the summer of 2004. Parametric and non-parametric statistical methods were used to estimate the survival distribution and the mean and median estimates of the willingness-to-pay (WTP). The study emphasizes the importance of explicitly treating heterogeneous preferences and the sensitivity of the survival distribution to the estimation methods used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between equity and credit market development and economic growth, in a sample of five very important 'emerging' markets. In particular, employing a multivariate time-series methodology to test for long-run trends and causality between variables that proxy for stock market development, credit market development and economic development. The results seem to suggest that equity markets have a role to play only in relatively liberalized economies, like Chile and Mexico. In financially repressed economies, like India, the equity market does not affect real sector growth. Furthermore, the banking crises in the 1980s and 1990s in Chile and Mexico resulted in a negative relation between economic growth and the credit market. In South Korea, equity and credit markets both affect economic growth, but not vice versa. In countries where the nature of the stock market has been speculative, like Taiwan, a negative relationship is detected between equity market development and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze a firm’s joint decision to export and invest using a model that incorporates the essential features of self-selection and learning-by-exporting theories of firm-level dynamics. We calibrate the model to 2002–2007 Chilean manufacturing plant data and simulate it under different assumptions, finding that neither self-selection nor learning-by-exporting alone can adequately explain the observed cross-sectional relationship between firm level exports and capital, favoring instead a model that allows both mechanisms to work in tandem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the 8th Annual Iberoamerican Seminar held at the University of Talca in Talca, Chile on November 9-11, 2006. It discusses state-of-the-art knowledge on the relationship between wine and tourism in today's context and at building a multi-disciplinary and international network of researchers. The symposium featured several experts including JosE Negrin and Juan BlAnquez.

The purpose of this study was to apply an innovative model of expansion to irrigation management and development in fruit exporting regions in central Chile. The model showed how external influences (globalization, climate, mountains) and complex adaptive systems (water conflicts, institutions and markets) influenced the evolution of irrigation development (the extension and emergence of novel properties) towards constructive (planned irrigation development) and destructive (climate change) futures. The model was simple, geometrical, consistent and future oriented. It was an innovative representation of expanding irrigation development and valuable to entrepreneurial water developers because it described the macro-scale processes involved in irrigation development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conceptual innovation with respect to the enclave concept has been virtually absent compared with industry agglomerations. This is despite the fact that some varieties of agglomeration distinguished in the literature appear to come close to what previously were regarded as industrial enclaves and despite frequent allusions to the enclave nature of economic spaces produced by contemporary processes of globalization. Bringing the literature on agglomeration and enclaves into dialogue, we revisit the concept of the enclave-a concept that has been largely neglected since it enjoyed a popularity in connection with the study of particular (notably extractive) industries and particular (notably dependencia) theories of national economic development during the 1960s and 1970s. Much has changed since this time, which suggests that the concept of the enclave ought to be ripe for reevaluation. In this article we take an initial step in this direction, identifying analytical dimensions to the enclave and illustrating different manifestations of enclaves in the mining industry, drawing on the case of Chile. We conclude by advocating the renewed study of industry enclaves within contemporary economic geographic analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors aim to discuss the propensity or intention to create enterprise among university students in the region of Antofagasta, Chile, and to analyze the factors that influence the step from desire to intention. 681 students were surveyed. The data were analyzed by binary logistical regression. The results show that curriculum is among the variables that have a positive influence, while the desire for a high level of income and escaping unemployment has a negative influence on the intention. Also, being a woman has a negative influence on the intention to create enterprise. Some gender differences are discussed in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates empirically the relationship between market structure and consumer prices in the supermarket industry in Chile. A panel of monthly data from 16 cities in the period January 1998-September 2006 is used. We find that, the more concentrated the industry in a city, the higher the prices, while the participation of major national chains in cities tends to lower prices. In terms of magnitude, this latter effect prevails over the former. Moreover, the dominant local chain is found to behave differently depending on whether or not one of the national chains is present in the city. Finally, we find that prices rise when a national chain acquires another chain and both were previously in a city (inmerge) while if only one of the two was present (outmerge), prices fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the comparative response of multinationals and domestic firms to an economic crisis, using the empirical setting of a well defined case of economic slowdown in Chile. We find that employment in manufacturing plants has been drastically reduced during the economic crisis. Our findings reveal that multinationals are more likely to exit contributing to the employment contraction during the crisis, but surviving foreign firms experience lower employment reductions than domestic enterprises. These results are not fully consistent with the idea that multinationals are less affected by an economic crisis and that they may act as stabilisers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we evaluate the effectiveness of policy measures adopted by Chile and Colombia aiming to mitigate the deleterious effects of pro-cyclical capital flows. In the case of Chile, according to our GMM analysis, capital controls succeeded in reducing net short-term capital flows, but did not affect long-term flows. As far as Colombia is concerned, the regulations were capable of affecting total flows and also long-term ones. In addition, our cointegration models indicate that the regulations did not have a direct effect on the real exchange rate in the Chilean case. Nonetheless, the model used for Colombia did detect a direct impact of the capital controls on the real exchange rate. Therefore, our results do not seem to support the idea that those regulations were easily evaded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparatively focusing on the cultural representations of two historic stock market crashes (fin de siecle Argentina and Chile in the early 1980s), this article explores the stock market theory of value that emerges out of a reactionary nineteenth century critique of exchange value and the so-called new economic paradigm based on information technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an empirical characterization of poverty in Chile during the period 1987-2006. This characterization refers to both personal characteristics and access to main social services. Such characterization will help scholars and policymakers to understand the strengths of the Chilean poverty reduction process as well as the main challenges it faces from now to the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines common factor extraction techniques with permanent and temporary regime switching to analyse Chile's business cycle fluctuations. We find asymmetries across business cycle episodes as well as within the cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the long-run impact of capital goods imports, intermediate goods imports, and exports of manufactured and primary goods on total factor productivity in Chile. Using cointegration techniques, we find productivity-enhancing effects of capital and intermediate goods imports as well as manufactured exports, and productivity-limiting effects of primary exports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lake Llanquihue (41° 08′S 72° 47′W) has the second largest water volume in South America and is one of the most important recreational fishing destinations in Chile, accounting for 45% of the recreational fishing activity in the country. Simultaneously, the lake concentrates 33% of the non-native salmon and trout smolt farms which support the Chilean salmon aquaculture industry. We characterized the recreational fishing activity at Lake Llanquihue and estimated its economic benefits. We used the Travel Cost Method and count data techniques to estimate the recreational fishing demand of anglers surveyed on site from 1995 to 1996. The main fishes captured were rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, by bank anglers (59%) and Coho salmon, O. kisutch, by boat anglers (57%). We obtained social welfare estimates that varied from 3,336,700 US$ to 5,337,500 US$. These economic benefits indicate the importance of recreational fishing compared to alternative uses of the lake, like smolt production, which in 1995–1996 generated net benefits from 19.2 to 36.9 million US$. The information obtained from this study is pertinent to the management of recreational fisheries in the freshwater ecosystems of southern Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]