Search results

In the decades following Chile's 1990 return to democracy, successive governments adopted pioneering reforms aimed at modernizing the state and strengthening democratic governance. This chapter discusses the major developments within Chile's public sector since 1990, with an emphasis on reforms affecting the civil service and public sector management. The politics of the reform process was notable for successful consensus building and led to a more meritocratic, professionally managed public employment system. This chapter also provides an overview of initiatives to strengthen accountability through greater transparency and citizen participation in government, as well as the major public sector management reforms adopted during the last three decades.

In 1975, private and social housing production in Chile started to become increasingly privatized, in parallel with capital switching into the secondary circuit due to severe deindustrialization of the country. Since then, housing demand has largely drawn on state housing subsidies aimed at middle- to low-income demand, but more recently, a growing financialized mortgage market has increased demand even further, enlarging the mortgage debt burden on Chilean households. Private housing producers achieve higher profits by increasing sales prices, whilst production costs are kept relatively stable by purchasing and developing the cheapest land available, both on the fringes and within the inner sectors of the main metropolitan areas, as a form of accumulation by dispossession in hitherto underexploited, non-commodified land. However, low purchase prices of land create housing unaffordability for numbers of original owner-residents who sell land to redevelopers but cannot then afford replacement accommodation given the soaring housing prices in the main metropolises. It is for this reason that some central areas become gentrified. Focusing on the case of high-rise redevelopment of inner-city areas in Santiago, Chile, this paper addresses the extent to which demand and private developers’ profits increase alongside the risks of a generalized growing level of household debt and the displacement of low-income communities from inner areas. The continuous expansion of the extremely privatized housing market of Santiago responds to the needs of capital expansion rather than to the people’s needs.

This chapter aims to identify differences in the perception of transformational leadership (TL) of three generations – Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y or Millennials – for an in-depth understanding of the immediate role and challenges facing leaders in organizations. Current days is an excellent time to question what is known and what should be known about leadership and leaders. Latin American leadership characteristics can have a direct effect on the success of business ventures in the region. Leadership can be understood in diverse ways: as an attribute of a position in the organization; as a trait, according to the characteristic of the person; as a behavior, according to the way in which the person acts (Mallma-Vivanco & Córdova-Marcelo, 2015). Several studies carried out in Mexico, Colombia, and Chile show that the Latin American leaders believe that having good working relationships with low conflict is essential to their satisfaction and high performance, and they are usually authoritarian and prefer aggressiveness and assertiveness (Romero, 2004). This study reviews the literature across different generations and related best organizational practices to identify key definitions and empirical results. We compared and contrasted the data from different generations. The findings show that Baby Boomers have a better perception of TL of their leaders than Millennials and even those from Generation X. Thus, the empirical results allow business leaders to understand the differences in perceptions and the unique characteristics of the three generations of workforce in organizations: Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials.

The overall objective of this chapter is measuring the effect of key economic indicators and trends on the media reputation of an emergent country. The case analyzed is that of Chile, since 1990–2015. To deal with our objective, we measured the media reputation of Chile following validated criteria by Deephouse (2000).

A regression analysis was conducted to test our hypothesis that the coefficient of media favorableness (CoMF) of a country depends on the favorable or unfavorable trend of key economic indicators of the country. The dependent variable of our model was the Chilean CoMF. Independent variables were the monthly GDP variation, the monthly unemployment rate, the monthly average of the stock exchange index, the monthly average fuel price, and the monthly average copper price (a very important commodity to Chile).

Our results demonstrate that key economic indicators have a significant positive bearing on the media reputation of an emergent country as Chile, that is, when an emergent country is doing well economically, the press with a global scope tends to improve the reputation of that country, showing a more favorable image about it. In consequence, our hypothesis is supported. In the case of an emergent and small Western country as Chile, the price of commodities appears as the most important predictive indicator of its favorable or unfavorable country reputation. Other implications are discussed in the study.

Over the last decade, the Chilean economy has experienced rapid growth, allowing per capita GDP to rise from $10,700 to $19,887. Additionally, the capital markets size increased over 16%. Given this, it is expected that Chile will be considered a developed country by 2020, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Chile is in the initial stages of joining the OECD; a process that is expected to accelerate positive changes in the economy. However, in recent years, publicly traded Chilean firms began to face financial scandals causing the upheaval of the regulatory market structures and initiating environmental legislation. These scandals have consistently occurred across all economic sectors and typically have included companies with large market capitalizations and strong risk management procedures. Nevertheless, these mechanisms have proven unsuccessful due to misinformation or information manipulation. The changes to the Chilean economy can be considered as operational risk to its member firms. These risks typically result from inadequate or failed internal processes or people systems, and/or from external events. The radical changes in this transitional economy and the impact on the differing companies involved are good examples that should provide a warning for emerging market economies trying to implement risk management control systems. Unfortunately, agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States cannot be modeled in the traditional sense in countries similar to Chile. Different authors simplified operational risk management, but this framework is not feasible in emerging economies based solely on the criteria of identification, evaluation, monitoring, and management.

In this chapter, the authors analyze the relationship between academia, organization, and gender in Chile. In particular, the connection between academic practices, management, and hegemonic masculinity throughout the history of Chilean universities. The authors took a critical approach from the field of gender and organizational studies, shedding new light on a longstanding problem: gender-based violence in universities. The authors will discuss how the centrality of management in Chilean universities makes sense in a late and globally connected capitalist scenario, characterized by the introduction of managerialism and business logic in higher education. Consequently, the practice of management acquired a central and hegemonic status that articulates the rest of the academic practices, organizing them not only in terms of the hegemony of management but also in terms of male hegemony.

This chapter describes an institutional choice that most Latin American countries have taken in the past 25 years: the creation of national Public Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (PPME) systems. We summarize research assessing their institutionalization, identify their shortcomings, and discuss trends demonstrating a potential – not yet realized – to fulfill their vocation as instruments of political and democratic accountability. Despite remarkable progress in their institutionalization, the evidence suggests that the systems fall short in producing strong results-oriented democratic accountability. Key factors hindering this aspiration include the systems' low credibility, problems associated to their diversification, low institutional coherence, and lack of effective coordination mechanisms to improve information legibility, its quality, its usefulness, and thus its use by both public managers and citizens. We suggest that PPME systems depend on environmental conditions beyond government structures and processes and argue that citizen-oriented mechanisms and entry points for social participation around the systems are required to fulfill their accountability function.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the economic development Chile has had in the last few years with main focus on economic growth, leaving behind social and environmental variables which could be classified as unsustainable development.

Statements, examples, and data are presented in order to support that the development Chile has experienced in the last years is not a sustainable development. Further, through interviews and focus groups across the nation, opinion leaders and citizens have been approached in order to assess their future vision of a sustainable country.

This chapter provides inputs for further decision making processes for public and private policies towards sustainable development in Chile.

The development of Chile is commonly assessed from an economic point of view without considering social or environmental variables which are as important as the economic parameters for realizing a real sustainable development. Thus this chapter adopts a triple-bottom line approach to argue that social and environmental issues should be considered simultaneously with economic progress.

Governance and opacity issues have increased since the early 1990s and several governance indicators are introduced by international organizations and NGOs. The governance indicators have been used in various sectors, directly affecting a nation's political reputation. This study analyzes the context of governance and opacity in Argentina and Chile and assesses the relationship between the cultural pattern and the functioning of institutions. A first approximation to the analysis of Argentina and Chile seems to lead to the conclusion of the existence of homogeneity between them as a result of a similar background. However, differences in geography and history generate different societal norms, and functioning of institutions within them. Chile's geographical isolation and limited natural resources leads the country toward economic growth and political stability. By contrast, in Argentina, populist regimes undermine the foundations of its economy while its middle class struggles and loses public trust. The various factors interactively affect quality of public policies and governance and, consequently, are conducive to differences in the perceived and real levels of opacity between both countries. Is corruption a culture-specific issue? If yes, then, is governance a consequence of culture too? Therefore, it is important to interpret a context behind governance in order to establish appropriate anticorruption reform in practice. This chapter seeks to address some of these issues by means of a case study comparison between Argentina and Chile and contribute to the understanding of the context in which negotiations may occur when FDI and M&A deals take place.