EMPIRICAL REGULARITIES OF THE CHILEAN ECONOMY: 1986-2005

Abstract

This paper documents the main empirical regularities of the Chilean economy over the past twenty years, characterizing it in two dimensions. First, it describes the economy’s structure in terms of the sectors’ relative sizes in the long term and the importance of the various components of aggregate demand. Second, it documents the main features of business cycles in Chile. The volatility and persistence of several variables across the cycles is described, together with the correlations within a set of significant variables. In general, the correlations observed tend to indicate that supply-side factors play an important role in explaining business cycles in Chile. On the aggregate demand side, terms of trade and availability of foreign capital are found to have substantial effects on all its different components.