Economy & Business - October 2025

It was no more than one sentence in a central bank report on monetary policy, which normally would have found little interest outside of the investment community, that provoked a public debate over President Gabriel Boric’s legacy. In the report published on 10 September, Chile’s central bank argued that weak job growth was in part to blame on Boric’s economic policies, particularly successive increases in the minimum wage and the shortening of the working week. Those measures increased labour costs and led companies to hire fewer workers the argument went. Boric, who normally would not be spending much time brooding over central bank studies, did not like that explanation and said so publicly.