Chile 1820-2020: a case of frustrated development?

More than six decades ago, Aníbal Pinto Santa Cruz (1959) published his pivotal work, Chile, a case of frustrated development. Almost sixty-five years later, this concept has reborn under the massive protests and social unrest of 2019, the COVID pandemic, and the new lithium cycle. Chile, the former "Latin American Miracle", became an unstable and troublesome state, not particularly different from its Latin American neighbors. In this chapter, we provide a quantitative assessment of the Chilean economy over 200 years. One of the main points that have been overlooked in the Chilean economic history literature has been the (un)sustainable aspects of Chile¿s economic development. We address this point using complementary measures, such as the exploitation of natural resources, mixed environmental indicators, and adjusted net savings. The main results show a lack of convergence with the leading economies and a contested leadership in the Latin American context.