When Chile’s President-elect Sebastian Pinera told me that Chile may become Latin America’s first developed country by 2025, I was skeptical. But I found that, on second thought, his forecast might not be outlandish.
Pinera, who was inaugurated on Sunday, is a right-of-centre business tycoon who has already served as president from 2010 to 2014. In an interview he told me that his goal will be “to recover the leadership and dynamism we have lost in recent years” and “to transform Chile into a developed country by 2025.”
To its credit, Chile reduced poverty from almost 40 percent of the population at the end of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990 to 11.7 percent in 2015, by most measures more than any other Latin American country.
