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This article estimates the economic rents received by the 10 mines that comprise Chile’s large-scale private-sector copper-mining industry. The methodology used produces a conservative calculation and includes two corrections that have hitherto been ignored in the literature: the reimbursement of exploration expenses and the compensation needed for volatility in the copper price. Estimates show that the wealth transferred to these firms between 2005 and 2014 was at least US$ 114 billion. These rents are neutral in terms of investment and production decisions; in other words, if the private mining companies had paid the Chilean Treasury the calculated amount, their total investment and output would have been unchanged, but the country at large could have benefited from the huge voluminous resources in question. Moreover, in the absence of any other distortion, the firms would still have earned returns equivalent to what they would have obtained under perfect competition.

Enotourism has emerged as a promising, sustainable type of tourism that can provide many benefits for local, regional, and national economies. This study critically describes the current situation ...

Today, based on the best scientific knowledge available, the main concerns regarding nature are the rampant ongoing destruction of Earth’s ecosystems and the increasing global warming, which threaten the very survival of the human species. The main reason is that the current functioning of the complex global socioeconomic-ecological systems of the world is driving the planet, with high certainty, towards a completely unsustainable deterioration of its natural capital, biodiversity, and atmosphere. This is the result of the manipulation of the power mechanisms within the socioeconomic-ecological systems of every country by the small powerful elites with the purpose of appropriating for themselves the enormous economic rents generated by the overexploitation of the planet’s natural resources and ecosystems. The monumental challenges of climate change, global warming, and nature deterioration are just the physical symptoms of the underlying unsustainable operation of the world’s socioeconomic-ecological systems (or social-ecological systems as they are generally known today). On the other side, its social and economic symptoms are the billions of people living in poverty, without water, proper education, and health services, and the prevailing enormous inequities in the distribution of the world’s wealth and income. In this chapter, using the Latin American experience, we analyze why this is happening and how enormously difficult is to change the current functioning of the system. We conclude with a rather pessimistic view about the possibility of meeting the challenges that all of us, as the human species, face today. Our only hope seems to be to use the opportunity offered by the modern communication technologies to inform the people of every country about the large risks and dangers we are all exposed to, and mobilize them to take effective control of the decision-making mechanisms that today are in the hands of the small powerful elites. This is obviously a monumental task.

This chapter analyzes the contribution of Participative Management Plans (PMP) for the identification of ecosystem services and the protection of conservation objects from the multiple-use protected coastal marine areas (MU-CMPA). The objective of these areas is to conserve the natural capital and cultural patrimony without restricting traditional productive activities such as fishing, mollusks and algae extraction, and energy resources. There are ten MU-CMPAs areas in Chile, but their implementation has been slow and 14 years after the first areas were legally declared, some of them still do not have management plans. Here we analyze the experiences of Isla Grande de Atacama MU-CMPA (MU-CMPA IGA) in the north of Chile, including the complexities of implementing PMPs and the challenges and opportunities of generating an ecosystem perspective in the management plans for protected areas. Administrative problems and conflicts of interest have worn social relationships generating little community participation regarding the design of a management plan. Nevertheless, there is a consensus among local social actors about the benefits of the ecosystems of the MU-CMPA IGA due to the high economic and social values given by the community to the services provided by the area.

Most previous studies of income inequality have either ignored capital gains or have used taxable realized capital gains to estimate top incomes. Neither of these approaches is fully satisfactory. We apply for the first time a new methodology that allows us to account for fundamental accrued capital gains as part of the top incomes in a theoretically consistent manner. We estimate the shares of the superrich in Chile showing that accrued capital gains have a dramatic impact on these estimates. Also, the top income shares estimated using fundamental capital gains appear to exhibit a more stable and presumably more plausible time profile than estimates based on capital gains derived from asset market variations.

This paper hypothesizes that fiscal policy is one important factor determining whether or not environmentally and socially sustainable economic growth is possible. We postulate that tax policies affect the incentives to make the economy more or less dependent on natural resources and the environment as factors of production. So-called pro-growth tax policies consisting of a low tax burden, low direct taxes but high indirect ones, affect the composition of factor endowment, often inducing overinvestment in physical capital and underinvestment in human capital, including education and health. These policies in part explain a structure of production heavily dependent on natural-resource-based and environmentally dirty industries. Moreover, these tax policies induce high levels of inequality, which ultimately may render economic growth socially and politically unsustainable. This analysis has important implications for Chile and for other developing countries, especially in Latin America, which are highly dependent on natural resources and have highly unequal income distributions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

We develop a method that allows transforming retained business profits in a particular year into business-accrued capital gains of the same year. These capital gains thus estimated can be simply added to other sources of personal income of top earners to obtain a consistent measure of their total income.

This paper reviews and summarizes most of the literature on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), focusing mainly on disentangling and clarifying the key concepts underlying the two classes of existing theoretical explanations for the EKC occurrence — those driven by technology and those driven by preferences — as well as the technical formalization of such concepts. To do this, we develop a model which allows the analysis of the two types of theoretical explanations under a common theoretical framework. Using this analytical setting, we first review models with technology as the main driver of the EKC, and then we study those with preferences as the fundamental driver. Finally, we present a closed form solution for the EKC which, on the one hand, is simpler and less restrictive than previous ones in the literature and, on the other hand, helps us to highlight some of the remaining theoretical gaps and to propose some possibilities for future research.

This paper studies the determinants of manufacturing exports toChina. Data from 79 countries for the 1990-2006 period and estimatesof gravity equations are used to analyse the effects of countries' factorendowment, geographical characteristics and degree of economicopenness. The results are consistent with the factor abundance modeland reveal that economies with a larger human capital endowment exporta greater volume of manufactures to China. Having a large economyand being geographically close to China also make a country morelikely to export manufactures to it. The results do not indicate that othercharacteristics of countries, such as openness to trade or an outlet to thesea, play an important role; nor does the endowment per worker of land orcapital. The implications of this study should be of interest to economiesseeking to benefit from the remarkable dynamism of the Chinese economyby diversifying their exports into manufactures.

Summary In an increasingly human-dominated world, more realistic, holistic and durable linkages need to be created for protected areas (PAs), for the sake of long-term conservation of species and habitats, and of ecosystem goods and services for serving the local people, as well as societies at large. In conjunction, geographical, physical and biological concepts of linkages need to be extended to embrace socio-economic factors. This paper develops a conceptual approach to this task, employing the nascent notions of ‘emerging ecosystems’, restoring natural capital and ‘socio-ecological systems’. We employ the value notion generally used by economic science, i.e. monetary value, as a conceptual tool in the unavoidable assessment process that modern societies must undertake to decide about conserving or restoring PAs, and ecosystems in general. We also draw attention to the importance of ecological and socio-economic thresholds of irreversibility in the evaluation and decision-making process concerning PAs and their linkages with other PAs, and especially with the unprotected world beyond their boundaries.

This paper estimates the true economic income for the Chilean mining sector, using the welfare foundations for the usual net domestic product (NDP) income measure of the traditional National Accounts System (NAS) provided by [ Weitzman, M., 1976. On the welfare significance of national product in a dynamic economy. Quarterly Journal of Economics. 90, 156–162 ; Weitzman, M., 2000. The linearised Hamiltonian as comprehensible NDP. Environment and Development Economics. 5, 55–68]. The total depletion of natural capital caused by mining is calculated by estimating, on the one hand, the depreciation of resources (using the net price approach) and, on the other, the environmental costs provoked by mining activity. The results show that, correcting the usual GDP measure for man-made capital depreciation plus the total loss of natural capital, the standard mining GDP measure of the NAS overestimates by 31–36% the economic income generated by Chile's mining sector during the period 1985–1996.

Proposes a framework for the analysis and the execution of policies aimed at the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing countries. This framework is derived from institutional theory that offers, we argue, an alternative for those interested in understanding the forces that influence the adoption of ICTs in developing countries. We use the framework as a lens to tease out meanings of the Chilean case and identify possible courses of action that a country in a similar situation may take to expand and boost the expansion of ICTs. By drawing on the framework, we theorize about why some policies achieve their objectives while some others may not. We conclude by suggesting ways in which the framework can be applied by planners and decision makers in the formulation and evaluation of national ICTs policies.

In the past, Cd regulations have imposed trade restrictions on foodstuffs from some developing countries seeking to access markets in the developed world and in recent years, there has been a trend towards imposing more rigorous standards. This trend seems to respond more to public and private sectors strategies in some developed countries to create disguised barriers to trade and to improve market competitiveness for their industries, than to scientifically justified health precautions (sanitary and phytosanitary measures) and/or technical barriers to trade acceptable under the Uruguay Round Agreement of the WTO. Applying more rigorous Cd standards in some developed countries will not only increase production costs in developing countries but it will also have a large impact on their economies highly dependent on international agricultural markets. In the current literature there are large uncertainties in the cause-effect relationship between current levels of Cd intakes and eventual health effects in human beings; even the risk of Cd to kidney function is under considerable debate. Recent works on the importance of zinc:Cd ratio rather than Cd levels alone to determine Cd risk factors, on the one hand, and on the declining trends of Cd level in foods and soils, on the other, also indicate a lack of scientific evidence justifying more restrictive cadmium standards. This shows that developing countries should fight for changing and making more transparent the current international structures and procedures for setting sanitary and phytosanitary measures and technical barriers to trade.