Is the Oecd Model Suitable for Strategic Public Enterprises in Terms of National Development? Reflections from Codelco Case, Chile

The public enterprise has returned to play a visible role in world economies. The privatization wave experienced by the world, with different intensities depending on the region since the 1970s, failed in eliminating state enterprises control from the economic sphere. Actually, public enterprises refuse to disappear at all, even in higly market-oriented economies, as the Chilean one. Enterprises that remain in the hands of the Chilean State have been managed, increasingly, under a private logic, inspired by notions of corporate governance of the OECD. However, an enterprise, CODELCO (National Copper Corporation of Chile by its acronym in Spanish), one of the largest state-owned copper enterprises in the world, has not fully entered into that scheme. Both the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and the subsequent democratic governments have considered CODELCO as strategic, mainly by the amount of resources it provides to the treasury. This document is twofold. On the one hand, to characterize CODELCO to subsequently discuss whether it is appropriate that this enterprise fits all "best practices" that the OECD has identified for SOEs.