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.