If Chilean exports are analyzed not from the point of view of the values involved, but from the point of view of the number of Chilean exporting companies involved and the countries of destination, some interesting and little-known data are discovered.
A recent study by the Undersecretariat for International Economic Relations (“Characterization of Chilean exporting companies”) reports that in 2020 there were 7,600 companies in Chile that carried out some export activity. This figure is less than what had been presented over the last 7 years, which highlights that an international crisis like the one in 2020 affected the number of companies involved in the Chilean export effort, but not necessarily the exported values. In this sense, the economy has a kind of adjustment cushion that can be sacrificed in times of commercial difficulties.
Of that amount, 4,889 companies, that is, more than 50% of all exporting companies, carried out export activities to different Latin American countries, which also represents the lowest number of exporting companies to Latin America since 2011. Throughout the decade, in any case, Latin American countries have remained the main trading partners of Chilean exporters. As a point of reference, it was possible to see that only 2,395 Chilean companies exported to Europe.
If the number of companies that export to the different countries of destination is counted, it is evident that, in 2020, there were 2,209 companies that carried out export operations to the United States. However, towards Peru, the number of Chilean companies linked to that country for export operations was 2,121, a number not far from the number of companies that sell to the United States. It is followed as the third country of destination by China, with 1,250 companies that sell in said market. Subsequently, in descending order, Argentina (1,195 companies), Brazil (1,135 companies), Colombia (952 companies), Mexico (860 companies), Bolivia (860 companies), Ecuador (848 companies) are located and only later appear in that ranking countries such as Spain, Germany and the Netherlands.
These antecedents lead us to think that the number of Chilean companies that export or are willing to export to some Latin American country cannot be due only to geographical proximity or to the facilities provided by a common language. It is conceivable that the network of agreements and treaties that Chile has been weaving, over the last 30 years, with practically all the countries of the region –perhaps with the sole exception of Guayana– has a lot to do with the situation that we describe. Indeed, free trade agreements and treaties with Latin American countries have the quality of being agreements between equals. These are countries with a similar degree of economic, industrial and technological development, which generates niches and commercial offers that have a greater potential for complementation. This makes a difference with the treaties with highly developed countries, with which trade is focused on the traditional exchange of highly manufactured and technology goods, versus primary goods with low levels of added value. Trade with Latin America has, in fact, a higher content of manufactured goods than the rest of our exports to the world.
The fact that there is a large number of companies commercially linked to the different countries of Latin America implies that there are great possibilities of advancing in the new stages of the integration processes at the regional level. The reciprocal reduction or elimination of tariffs played an important role in the degrees of integration achieved in past decades, and this situation still generates the favorable framework for entrepreneurial activities in the field of foreign trade. But the new great leaps forward in terms of integration require greater physical complementation – rail, lake, air and land – and a substantial reduction in reciprocal procedures for intra-regional exchanges, which in turn requires validation agreements exchange of documents and shared single windows, and also requires the strengthening of value chains between companies from different countries. And in all these goals, the existence of more than 4 thousand companies that know the land constitute a capital of prime importance.
The context of international trade is changing by leaps and bounds, and that requires not insisting on a pure and simple reissue of the treaties created in previous decades. They all deserve to be subject to permanent review. In this delicate study of what is old and what is yet to be born in terms of international trade architectures, the institutional fabric present with the countries of Latin America, I believe, forms part of what is positive and can be preserved, even when it is also modifiable and improvable.
- The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of The counter.
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