Economy & Business - May 2009 (ISSN 1741-7430)

March was clearly a horrible month for the economy. On 5 May the Banco Central de Chile reported that the economy had contracted 0.7% year-on-year in March. The main reason for the contraction was a poor performance by manufacturing and mining. More encouragingly for the government, electricity output in April was up 2% year-on-year. Despite this, industrial output in April fell 11.1% year-on-year. Some of this fall was due to the later Easter this year, but the result was much worse than independent economists expected.