The purpose of this chapter is to re-examine the convergence process in Chile, utilizing more recent data and focusing on the role of public (domestic) and foreign direct investment in shaping the welfare levels across regions. There have been many prior studies focusing on the problem of regional convergence in Chile. Morandé et al. (1996) argue that some evidence is found to support regional GDP/pc absolute convergence in Barro-style estimations for the period 1960–1992. Here, they estimated that convergence occurred at an annual rate of 1.2%. However, the same authors find that using time series analysis results raises doubts about the convergence properties derived from their equation system. Fuentes (1996) obtains similar results postulating an annual convergence rate of 1.3%; in addition, he also estimated convergence rates with income per capita data, and found this to be much higher, of the order of 7.4% per annum.
