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Aymara Indians are a geographically isolated, indigenous people living in the Andes Mountains near Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the most arid regions of the world. As rapid economic growth in the area has begun to divert scarce water to hydroelectric and agricultural projects, the Aymara struggle to maintain their sustainable and traditional systems of water use, agriculture, and pastoralism. In Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes , Amy Eisenberg provides a detailed exploration of the ethnoecological dimensions of the tension between the Aymara, whose economic, spiritual, and social life are inextricably tied to land and water, and three major challenges: the paving of Chile Highway 11, the diversion of the Altiplano waters of the Río Lauca for irrigation and power-generation, and Chilean national park policies regarding Aymara communities, their natural resources, and cultural properties within Parque Nacional Lauca, the International Biosphere Reserve.  Pursuing collaborative research, Eisenberg performed ethnographic interviews with Aymara people in more than sixteen Andean villages, some at altitudes of 4,600 meters. Drawing upon botany, agriculture, natural history, physical and cultural geography, history, archaeology and social and environmental impact assessment, she presents deep, multifaceted insights from the Aymara’s point of view. Illustrated with maps and dramatic photographs by John Amato, Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development provides an account of indigenous perspectives and concerns related to economic development that will be invaluable to scholars and policy-makers in the fields of natural and cultural resource preservation in and beyond Chile.

Contrary to the idea that neighbourhood cohesion is something that inherently benefits the poor or counterbalances the forces of social exclusion, in this article we argue that it can also function as a mechanism of cumulative advantage. In order to explore this proposal, we offer a definition and key dimensions of neighbourhood cohesion based on three components: place attachment, local relations and commitment to the local common good. We test our proposal in a highly segregated Latin American city: Santiago, Chile. A combination of survey data and georeferenced information was obtained from a random sample of 700 residents. The results reveal the existence of four neighbourhood cohesion types: Communitarians, Belongers, Strangers and Outsiders. As expected, we found that people who reside in affluent areas and perceive themselves to live in more reputable neighbourhoods are those who report the strongest patterns of neighbourhood cohesion. We conclude by questioning the scope and effectiveness of policies which have promoted neighbourhood cohesion as a ‘tool’ of governance without first attempting to reduce socio-spatial rifts. We also ask whether these notable spatial differences in neighbourhood cohesion contribute to improving the overall social cohesion at the city level. 与街区凝聚力本质上有益于穷人或能抵消社会排斥力量的观点相反，在本文中，我们认为它也可能作为累积优势的机制。为了探索这一假设，我们提出了一个基于三个组成部分的街区凝聚力的定义和关键维度：地方依附、地方关系和对地方共同利益的承诺。我们在一个高度隔离的拉丁美洲城市测试我们的假设：智利的圣地亚哥。调查数据和地理参考信息的结合是从随机抽样的700名居民中获得的。研究结果揭示了四种街区凝聚力类型的存在：社群主义者、归属者、陌生人和局外人。不出所料，我们发现居住在富裕地区、并认为自己生活在更有声望的街区的人报告的街区凝聚力最强。最后，我们质疑那些将街区凝聚力作为治理“工具”、却不首先试图减少社会空间裂痕的政策的范围和有效性。我们还探寻，这些显著的街区凝聚力空间差异是否有助于提高城市一级的整体社会凝聚力。

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented economic crisis, intensifying poverty levels in Latin America, particularly in Chile. This study examines the short- and long-term socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 on income poverty in Chile, focusing on regional disparities, rurality, ethnicity, educational attainment, and immigration. Using data from the Chile National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (CASEN) for 2017, 2020, and 2022, we analyzed poverty trends across the pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic periods. We employed spatial clustering techniques with Local Moran’s I to detect poverty hotspots and applied logistic regression models to identify key sociodemographic factors associated with these hotspots. Our results reveal stark regional disparities, with disproportionately higher poverty rates among rural populations, Indigenous communities, and individuals with lower education levels or immigrant backgrounds. The proportion of individuals in poverty hotspots rose from 6.8% in 2017 to 8.6% in 2020, before slightly declining to 7.7% in 2022. Although emergency monetary subsidies helped reduce overall poverty from 10.8% in 2020 to 6.5% in 2022, these measures were insufficient to address deep-rooted structural inequalities. Our findings underscore the urgent need for targeted, long-term policies that go beyond temporary financial assistance and tackle systemic disparities linked to rurality, ethnicity, education, and immigration. Such measures are essential for achieving sustainable poverty reduction and fostering inclusive economic growth in Chile.

Dominant food systems are configured from the productivist paradigm, which focuses on producing large amounts of inexpensive and standardized foods. Although these food systems continue being supported worldwide, they are no longer considered fit-for-purpose as they have been proven unsustainable in environmental and social terms. A large body of scientific literature argues that a transition from the dominant food systems to alternative ones built around the wider principles of sustainable production and rural development is needed. Promoting such a sustainability transition would benefit from a diagnosis of food system types to identify those systems that may harbor promising characteristics for a transition to sustainable food systems. While research on food system transitions abounds, an operational approach to characterize the diversity of food systems taking a system perspective is still lacking. In this paper we review the literature on how transitions to sustainable food systems may play out and present a framework based on the Multi-Level Perspective on Socio-Technical Transitions, which builds upon conceptual developments from social and natural science disciplines. The objectives of the framework are to (i) characterize the diversity of existing food systems at a certain geographical scale based on a set of structural characteristics and (ii) classify the food systems in terms of their support by mainstream practices, i.e., dominant food systems connected to regimes; deviate radically from them, niche food systems such as those based on grassroots innovation; or share elements of dominant and niche food systems, i.e., hybrid food systems. An example is given of application of our framework to vegetable food systems with a focus on production, distribution, and consumption of low-or-no pesticide vegetables in Chile. Drawing on this illustrative example we reflect on usefulness, shortcomings, and further development and use of the diagnostic framework.

We use a simple theory of a system of cities to decompose the determinants of the city size distribution into three main components: efficiency, amenities, and frictions. Higher efficiency and better amenities lead to larger cities but also to greater frictions through congestion and other negative effects of agglomeration. Using data on MSAs in the United States, we estimate these city characteristics. Eliminating variation in any of them leads to large population reallocations, but modest welfare effects. We apply the same methodology to Chinese cities and find welfare effects that are many times larger than those in the US.

This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for five Latin American countries using a common measure of receptive language ability. We find important differences in development in early childhood across countries and steep socioeconomic gradients within every country. For the three countries where we can follow children over time, there are few substantive changes in scores once children enter school. Our results are robust to different ways of defining socioeconomic status, to different ways of standardizing outcomes, and to selective nonresponse on our measure of cognitive development.

WHO has targeted that medicines to prevent recurrent cardiovascular disease be available in 80% of communities and used by 50% of eligible individuals by 2025. We have previously reported that use of these medicines is very low, but now aim to assess how such low use relates to their lack of availability or poor affordability. We analysed information about availability and costs of cardiovascular disease medicines (aspirin, β blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, and statins) in pharmacies gathered from 596 communities in 18 countries participating in the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study. Medicines were considered available if present at the pharmacy when surveyed, and affordable if their combined cost was less than 20% of household capacity-to-pay. We compared results from high-income, upper middle-income, lower middle-income, and low-income countries. Data from India were presented separately given its large, generic pharmaceutical industry. Communities were recruited between Jan 1, 2003, and Dec 31, 2013. All four cardiovascular disease medicines were available in 61 (95%) of 64 urban and 27 (90%) of 30 rural communities in high-income countries, 53 (80%) of 66 urban and 43 (73%) of 59 rural communities in upper middle-income countries, 69 (62%) of 111 urban and 42 (37%) of 114 rural communities in lower middle-income countries, eight (25%) of 32 urban and one (3%) of 30 rural communities in low-income countries (excluding India), and 34 (89%) of 38 urban and 42 (81%) of 52 rural communities in India. The four cardiovascular disease medicines were potentially unaffordable for 0·14% of households in high-income countries (14 of 9934 households), 25% of upper middle-income countries (6299 of 24 776), 33% of lower middle-income countries (13 253 of 40 023), 60% of low-income countries (excluding India; 1976 of 3312), and 59% households in India (9939 of 16 874). In low-income and middle-income countries, patients with previous cardiovascular disease were less likely to use all four medicines if fewer than four were available (odds ratio [OR] 0·16, 95% CI 0·04–0·57). In communities in which all four medicines were available, patients were less likely to use medicines if the household potentially could not afford them (0·16, 0·04–0·55). Secondary prevention medicines are unavailable and unaffordable for a large proportion of communities and households in upper middle-income, lower middle-income, and low-income countries, which have very low use of these medicines. Improvements to the availability and affordability of key medicines is likely to enhance their use and help towards achieving WHO's targets of 50% use of key medicines by 2025. Population Health Research Institute, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario, AstraZeneca (Canada), Sanofi-Aventis (France and Canada), Boehringer Ingelheim (Germany and Canada), Servier, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, King Pharma, and national or local organisations in participating countries.

Tree plantations play a controversial role in many nations’ efforts to balance goals for economic development, ecological conservation, and social justice. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by analyzing the socioeconomic impact of such plantations. We focus our study on Chile, a country that has experienced extraordinary growth of industrial tree plantations. Our analysis draws on a unique dataset with longitudinal observations collected in 180 municipal territories during 2001–2011. Employing panel data regression techniques, we find that growth in plantation area is associated with higher than average rates of poverty during this period.

This paper examines the relationships between the built environment— both ' neighborhood' design characteristics and relative location—and motor vehicle ownership and use in a rapidly motorising, developing city context, that of Santiago de Chile. A vehicle choice model suggests that income dominates the household vehicle ownership decision, but also detects a relationship between several built environment characteristics and a household's likelihood of car ownership. A second model, directly linked to the ownership model to correct for selection bias and endogeneity, suggests a strong relationship with locational characteristics like distance to the central business district and Metro stations. Elasticities of vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT), calculated via the combined models, suggest that income plays the overall largest single role in determining VKT. In combination, however, a range of different design and relative location characteristics also display a relatively strong association with VKT.

We explore how railroads affected population growth during the first globalization (1865–1920) in Chile. We look at areas with a strong comparative advantage in agriculture using novel data that document 60 years of railroad construction. Using instrumental variables, we present four main findings. First, railroads increased both urban and rural population growth. Second, the impact was stronger in areas with more potential for agricultural expansion. Third, railroads increased specialization in agriculture when combined with a high level of the real exchange rate. And fourth, railroads had little effect on human capital and fertility. These results suggest that the effects of transportation technologies depend on existing macroeconomic conditions.