This document makes a comprehensive analysis of the inequality of the water market in Chile, measured by the Gini coefficient method. The situation of water rights in Chile is of particular interest because it is a wholly privatized system, where rights are traded in the market and therefore water is presented as a commodity. This privatization of water in Chile occurred as part of the process of neo-liberalization since the 1981 Water Code. The results of this study indicate that both concentration and inequality in the distribution of water rights are very high, which undermines a just social development process and facilitates the economic exploitation of the environment. It proposes a profound revision of the application of a mercantile logic to a scarce essential resource for life such as water and explores the importance of its role as a national good for public use.
The article introduces how investification serve as an analytical framework for unpinning the increase of the buy-to-let phenomenon in a reduced letting market that produces a rise in letting prices. The Chilean neoliberal context and the dis-regulated condition of property-rent markets provides a chance for reviewing the insights of how housing and letting are undermining the affordability in the Latin American region. The first part is centred on an explorative statistical analysis based on CASEN survey 2009-2017 to identify the variations in the household whose incomes come from letting urban properties. To deepen the analysis, the second part explores the financial profitability of letting business in a specific borough of Santiago. This analysis employs two financial methods: the Yield and the Net Present Value (NPV). The results indicate that there is a higher concentration of this type of business in the wealthiest 10% while the profitability of letting business is high. These results demonstrate the existence of investificacion in Santiago and some public policy alternatives are offered to engage in a broader international discussion.
This article identifies the spatial correlation between the social determinants of health in the housing area (housing prices, overcrowding, poor-quality building materials, and household socioeconomic vulnerability) and the spread of COVID-19 in Santiago de Chile. The research used data from the 2017 Census conducted by the National Institute of Statistics of Chile and data on confirmed cases of COVID-19 (PCR) by communes provided by/obtained from Chile’s Ministry of Health. The article provides a two-fold examination/analysis of the spatial correlation using the Pearson measure to observe how the virus spread from areas with high-quality housing in the early stage of the contagion to then become concentrated in areas with low-quality of housing. The second examination/analysis is a multiple linear regression to identify the housing factors that inform virus propagation. The test results show that of the four social determinants of health relating to housing assessed here, housing prices is the variable that best predicts how the social determinants of health based on housing explain the progress of the pandemic for the Santiago case, following the collinearity factors according to the data used in this study. The conclusions suggest that public policy should treat housing quality as a factor in public health and health risks that needs to be addressed with a transdisciplinary approach to urban planning in Chile.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.