Correlation between Copper and Chilean Peso (3)

Happy to provide the missing piece of the additional analysis requested by a reader.


Calculated correlation based on monthly, quarterly and yearly time series using 12 months, 10 quarters and 5 years on a rolling basis. Plotted below against copper market share of exports.

Following conclusions can be drawn:

• For shorter time intervals you get more noise, but an a yearly basis you get very high correlation (i.e. low correlation coefficient smaller than -80%)
• There seem to be periods with high correlation regimes (1992-1998, 2003 to present)
• Correlation breaks-down in 1989-2991 and 1999-2002

Correlation between Copper and Chilean Peso (2)

Taking up a reader comment, I have updated the export data back to 1989. I have also eliminated the data from the free economic zone as they tend to be re-exports, so overall data for 1996-2010 might look slightly differently. Clearly from 1989 to 1993 the dependency on copper has been reduced from 50% to 35%. After 2003 dependency increased again to a level of almost 60%.

















Other mining can be decomposed as follows (values for 2010 in USD million). Molybdenum and gold are generally by-products of copper mining. Lithium's importance is much lower than widely assumed.

Answering the question of the commodity nature of the "other" export is not straight forward, although both the agro and more importantly industrial segments could be classified to a significant extent as commodity based with lower value addition:

Agro is mostly fruit and represents 6.3% of total exports.
Industrial is more diversified and represents 28.4% of exports. Within the industrial bucket the largest contributors are cellulose (12.3% of industrial), salmon (10.2%), wine (7.9%), wood (6.8%), fish meal (2.6%), copper wire (2.4%) and transport material (2.1%).

Will follow-up with a separate post with the development of R2 and beta based on monthly data points.