Paris School of Economics says Chile adds 120 years of extreme inequality

Chile has 120 years of extreme inequality and is one of the countries with the most socioeconomic differences in Latin America, warned a report released by the Paris School of Economics.

The study, led by the World Inequality Lab -dependent on the academic institution-, pointed out that half of the population with fewer resources accumulates wealth of approximately 0% of the total, while the richest 1% has almost half of it (49.6%).

In fact, the accumulated wealth of the least rich 50% is negative, -0.6%, due to the amount of the population in debt in this sector, the research center added.

“The country is one of the most unequal in Latin America with levels comparable to the inequality of Brazil,” said the document, coordinated by several emblematic economists, including Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman.

Regarding income, half of the poorest population accumulates 10%, while the richest tenth account for 60% and the wealthiest 1% accumulates 26.5% of the income.

Female labor income is 38% of the total, which implies a “significant decrease” in inequality in the last 30 years and is close to other neighboring countries such as Argentina (37%) or Brazil (38%).

However, on average, each adult earns approximately 14 million pesos (about US $ 14,000) and while the bottom 50% earns over 2.8 million pesos (US $ 2,900), the top 10% earn almost 30 times more. 82.9 million (approximately US $ 86,000).

Inequality in Chile has been “extreme” in the last 120 years, even after the end of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), which sparked (in 2019) a wave of social protests, the study noted.

For more than a year, Chileans took to the streets en masse to demonstrate against a system “characterized by an economic elite that lives according to North American standards on the one hand and a very precarious working class and an increasingly impoverished middle class in the world. other”.

The protests left about thirty dead and thousands injured, and led to the drafting of a new Magna Carta to replace the current one, inherited from the dictatorship and interpreted by many as the origin of the country’s great inequalities due to its marked neoliberal cut. .

Chile is, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), one of the most unequal countries in the region – only behind Costa Rica – and it is also the nation that most wants the State to reduce its level of inequality region of.