MARCH 15, 2019

President Piñera promotes measures to revitalize the economy and encourage development

The President participated this Friday in a seminar during which he emphasized the importance of reducing obstacles and to making regulations and processes more flexible in order to foster economic development.

President Sebastián Piñera underlined the government’s proposal to move forward in a microeconomic revolution to boost, promote and revitalize the country’s development, by lowering standards and streamlining processes for investment projects.

“What we have wanted to do is awaken that healthy ambition, that mission to achieve something great and noble. And for that many things are required, but one of them is, without a doubt, to remove all those obstacles and bottlenecks that hinder and hold back development,” said the President at the Microeconomic Revolution seminar, where he was accompanied by Finance Minister, José Ramón Valente.

To promote growth and development, the President announced that a bill will be put before Congress that repeals 100 outdated, non-operational laws that have been tacitly repealed, but that hinder the performance of Chilean companies. This will be accompanied by a presidential instruction that obliges ministries and state agencies to periodically review and evaluate rules and regulations.

The President stated that every legal initiative should be evaluated as regards to the effect it could have on the economy.

“Regulations are often passed that no one has even measured as to the effect or impact they may have on the economy. Perhaps this information, if available to legislators, might have led them to legislate differently,” said the President.

The President also called for a freeing up of investment projects of US$65 billion and stressed the importance of strengthening the Office of Sustainable Project management (GPS) –which is focused on coordinating investors in order to guide and facilitate the processes that projects must be subjected to- along with the Office of Productivity and National Entrepreneurship (OPEN), which seeks to

simplify procedures, eliminate bureaucracy and incorporate SMEs into the modern economy.

“We set ourselves the main goal of recovering the leadership, dynamism and that healthy ambition we had lost,” the President said, adding, “this is a task that spans more than just one day, one year or one government, but I do believe we are moving in the right direction.”