Social security privatization and labor market reforms: how did they affect poverty and income distribution in Chile?

The aim of this paper is to analyze the trend of poverty and income distribution in Chile in the last seventeen years, that is since 1989, when elections allowed a coalition named Concertacion and driven by Patricio Aylwin to guide the country and to put an end to Augusto Pinochets government, which lasted 16 years, from 1973 to 1989. The reforms that Pinochets government brought about on the basis of the liberalist theories and realized with the aim to accelerate the countrys modernization process, certainly helped the economic growth, but even caused some persistent repercussions on both income distribution and poverty. The very nature of the fields of these reforms suggests the hypothesis that they could have affected the income distribution structure and, consequently, the poverty rate of population. The paper is structured on three sections: in the first, introductory, one, we briefly showed the main aspects of the social security system and the labour market reforms that Pinochets government carried out; in the second one, we presented an analysis of the trends of population and employment, to verify the basic conditions on which the governments of the Concertacion intervened since 1989; and in the last one, we examined the poverty and income distribution trends.