Mining in Chile

The mining sector in Chile is one of the pillars of Chilean economy and copper exports alone stands for more than one third of government income. Most mining in Chile is concentrated to the Norte Grande region spanning most of the Atacama Desert. Mining products of Chile includes copper, gold, silver, molybdenum, iron and coal.

Although the relative importance of copper declined in the 1970s and 1980s, it was still the Chilean economy's most important product in 1992. The mining sector represented 6.7 percent of GDP in 1992, as compared with 8.9 percent in 1985. In 1991, copper exports represented 30 percent of the total value of exports, a substantial decline with respect to the 1960s, when it represented almost 80 percent of total exports. Mining exports in general accounted for about 48 percent of total exports in 1991.

Two developments in the copper sector were noteworthy. First, in the 1987-91 period, there was a substantial increase in the output of refined copper, as well as a relative decline in the production of blister copper. Second, the state-owned Copper Corporation (Corporación del Cobre—Codelco), the world's largest copper producer, still had an overwhelmingly dominant role (accounting for 60 percent of Chile's copper output in 1991).

The so-called Codelco Law of April 1992 authorized Codelco for the first time to form joint ventures with the private sector to work unexploited deposits. Thus, in a major step for Codelco, in 1995, it invited domestic and foreign mining firms to participate in four joint explorations in northern Chile. Foreign owned private firms were to become increasingly important as new investment projects got underway.

The heightened importance of these foreign private firms in large-scale copper mining also resulted from the international business community's improved perception of Chile and from a mining law enacted during the Pinochet regime that clearly established compensation rules in the case of nationalization and otherwise encouraged investment in this sector.

...
Wikipedia