The Count

31...

...is the gap in percentage points between male and female hourly wages in Latin America. That's right, the region has made great progress in addressing gender disparities but income gaps nevertheless remain quite large.

For the full scoop head on over to Eclac, where you'll find a new report out this week on regional progress towards achieving the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As usual, this publication is a wonk's statistical wet dream and contains far more fascinating information than could ever be adequately covered here. So go check it out, here.

But what's there to learn about gender equality in the region from the report's myriad of tables and graphs?

Insight number one is that gender disparities don't seem to be driven by educational differences. In most countries of the region men and women exhibit very similar levels of enrollment in both primary and secondary schooling (but not so similar when it comes to tertiary schooling).

Insight number two is that in most countries women have begun to diversify away from purely agricultural employment. In this area, both Venezuela and Colombia stand out for making the most progress.

Insight number three: wage equality has steadily improved since 1990 but the gap with respect to men still remains large. However, as can be seen below, the gap is significantly smaller for salaried employees.

[Average hourly and salaried income of women, compared to men, urban areas (in percentages)]

The blue line shows women's average hourly income in relation men, the purple line shows average salaries in relation to men and the black line, 100 percent, represents men's wages. The first thing to notice is the big improvement since 1990. However, as can be seen from the dotted trend line to the right of 2008, the gap continues to narrow at the current pace it won't completely close even by the year 2015.

Now, an implication of the difference in relative gaps between hourly and salaried employees is that the lower your income, the less equality you should expect vis a vis men. And this takes us to insight number four: Latin America has A LOT of women in politics. No, seriously. It beats every other developing region of the world except for the Caribbean.

[Percentage of members of parliament that are women, 1990, 2005 and 2009]

So the moral of the story is... more equality for women in the heights of power and wealth but significantly less futher down on the socioeconomic stratum.

But hey. Stop reading my ramblings and go enjoy your freakin' weekend.

The Count: childhood poverty

45 and 17.9...

...are the percentages of children and teenagers in Latin America living in poverty and extreme poverty defined in terms broader than simple income. That's right, ECLAC has a new research bulletin out giving us a sneak peek of an upcoming ECLAC and UNICEF report on poverty trends throughout the region.

The idea is simple. Much like the World Bank's Human Opportunity Index (HOI), which sets out to measure access to the resources that grant a child the opportunity to succeed in life, this new measure of childhood poverty is based on the notion of human rights--both social and economic. In other words, going beyond the mere notion of income, a child is considered poor if any of his or her basic rights are violated. The six rights explicitly considered are:

1. Nutrition: defined in terms of weight and size by age.
2. Clean drinking water: taking into account it's origin, supply and accessibility.
3. Sanitation: defined as relative access to a sewer system.
4. Housing: considering the number of people per room, the building materials of the roof, floor and walls.
5. Education: in terms of assistance and number of completed school years.
6. Information: defined as access to electricity and having a radio, tv or telephone.

So how much of a difference does this new measure make? A LOT. The pie chart below shows the percentages of different poverty classifications for the whole region. Light blue is outside of poverty, dark gray represents income poverty, light gray is poverty in terms of both income and the absence of rights, and green is poverty just in terms of the violation of rights. In other words, without the new methodology, we'd be ignoring all of the green chunk and a big part of the light gray chunk.



Now, as usual, the Count asks: what does the country breakdown look like? And you'll find just such a thing right below, courtesy of Maladjusted Graphs™.

[Percentage of children and teenagers living in poverty and extreme poverty, circa 2008]

As can be seen above, the top five on the list are, in order, Costa Rica, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Venezuela. On the other extreme, the five countries where children are worse off are, again in order, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Peru. (so much for Peru's economic miracle, no?)

Well there you have it folks. Yet another welcome attempt to challenge the misleading simplifications of standard statistical indicators.

The Count

8...

...is the number of years it takes workers to reallocate into new industries after a 30% drop in manufacturing tariffs. Or at least according to simulations ran by researchers at the World Bank, the University of Virginia and Koç University in Istanbul.

Ok, perhaps we should back up for a second. Everyone knows that freer international trade is good cuz of stuff and junk. And by stuff I mean lower prices for consumers and by junk I mean efficiency gains from exposing domestic firms to international competition. The aptly named "gains from trade" can be bountiful, economists say, but reaping it's benefits involves adjustment costs as the less productive firms that can't compete "exit" the market (this is a euphemism for going out of business and firing workers) and the newly freed up resources (read: the newly unemployed) are reallocated.

Trade liberalization, in other words, produces both winners and losers, and the overall gains, proponents of free trade hold, outweigh the costs incurred by displaced workers.

But did you know that while every economist and their semi-literate grandmothers have attempted to estimate the value of the gains from trade, virtually no one has set out to comprehensively estimate the associated costs?

Well, Bernard Hoekman and Guido Porto, from the World Bank and the University of La Plata, respectively, have a nice summary of the most recent research on the subject. While the gains from trade can be huge, their collection of recent research shows that in practice workers displaced by liberalization often find it extremely hard to resettle into new and more productive work.

And this takes us to today's count. One of the studies cited by Hoekman and Porto, using data from the U.S., sets out to simulate the impact of a 30% reduction of manufacturing tariffs on labor adjustment costs. They find that the costs of moving between industries are very large, often several times a worker's average annual income. Perhaps more importantly, after liberalization it takes up to 8 years for 95% of the displaced workers to settle into a new line of work. This dramatic and lengthy period of adjustment implies sudden and large movements in wages, with displaced workers experiencing lower wages in both the short and long-run.

The Count: Latin America's infrastructure gap

2...

...is how many percentage points Latin America's average annual growth rate would increase if it achieved the same levels of infrastructure observed in other middle-income countries. Or at least according to a new policy paper by the World Bank.

According to the report, the retreat of the State in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s has resulted in a significant "infrastructure gap" in relation to other middle-income and newly industrialized countries. As the region rushed to privatize public entities and downsize the State, public investment in infrastructure dropped dramatically. At the same time, increased private participation in infrastructure development became the norm.

And in Latin America, private participation in infrastructure during the 1990s was larger than in any other region of the world. As can be seen below, there was a boom in private infrastructure investment between 1990 and 1998. Investment commitments increased from $10 billion in 1990 to more than $70 billion in 1998. These then crashed after 1998 in the wake of the Asian crisis and failed to recover during the early 2000s (due in part to Argentina's crisis and the completion of initial investments related to utility company privatizations).

[Private participation in infrastructure: investment commitments, millions of dollars]

But it seems that, despite this huge investment boom, when it came to infrastructure the private sector simply wasn't up to the task. To quote the report:

"Because private sector participation was not sufficient to offset the contraction of Latin America's public infrastructure spending, the ensuing fall in total spending resulted in a slowdown in infrastructure development in the region, and a widening gap vis-a-vis other world regions in terms of both infrastructure and growth."

Taking into account access to telecommunications, roads and electricity, the authors of the report put together an "infrastructure quantity" index for all of Latin America. The results: Latin America as a whole gets a low score of 0.88, compared to 1.02 for all other middle-income countries, 1.20 for East Asia and 2.09 for industrial countries.

Within the region, Central America is worse off, scoring 0.57. Chile, Venezuela and Brazil, in order, score the highest, with respective scores of 1.57, 1.37 and 1.12. These are well above the middle-income average and in the case of Chile and Venezuela, above the East Asia average--but nevertheless still far from the industrial average.

The gap is also quite large in terms of infrastructure quality, which is based on a series of polls:

[Overall infrastructure quality]

And now to the punch line. The result of all this is that Latin America would have supposedly been enjoying higher growth rates if it had levels of infrastructure on par with other middle income countries. To estimate this, the paper runs several standard growth regressions but incorporating its infrastructure quantity and quality indexes. It then takes the estimated impact of infrastructure on growth rates and combines it with the size of the gap.

The result is that on average, as the big two above says, annual growth rates would be 2 percentage points higher in Latin America without the infrastructure gap, with most of the increase due to higher quantity rather than quality. Significantly, countries in the Andean region would benefit the most from closing the infrastructure gap, with average growth rates 3.1 percentage points higher.

The Count

0...

...is the number of consistent and up to date estimates of social mobility for Latin America. That's right folks, there's a real poverty of information out there and although the Count is an expert counter, he's having a hard time on this one.

Why social mobility you might ask? Well, as I'm sure you all know, Latin America has the worst income distribution in the world and if there's anything liberals like to tout it's that inequality is acceptable so long as there's social mobility. That is, who cares if there are tremendous gaps between the rich and poor so long as people born at the bottom are able to move to the top? (well, I do, but that's a different story)

In any case, last week the Count told us about the state of "human opportunity" in Latin America, showing us that although the region has a long way to go, most countries have made significant progress in achieving universal coverage of the most basic services children need in order to have an opportunity for success. But how does having access to basic services associated with "opportunity" actually translate into upward social mobility? In other words, it is one thing to have access to schooling, clean drinking water, etc. but quite another to actually be born poor and climb up the income ladder.

So instead of measuring access to services that are expected to create equal opportunity and lead to social mobility, as the World Bank's human opportunity index does, why not measure social mobility directly?

Well, because it is extremely difficult to get the data and especially so in developing countries. And even when we have good data, there are several conceptual challenges involved: do we care about intra or inter-generational mobility? (that is, changes in income within one's lifetime or from one generation to the next) Should mobility be defined purely in income terms or should it be defined using softer and often subjective variables like empowerment or self-worth?

On the data front the difficulties are equally large. To measure social mobility you need very detailed data sets that follow individuals through large chunks of time. In other words, you need to survey someone in their youth and follow up on them during their adult life. Any other approach would be a statistical abstraction. Also, to allow international comparisons it would be preferable to have comparable methodologies, something that is rarely the case.

And yet in spite of these tremendous difficulties, there are some estimates out there. The graph below is from a paper published by the World Bank in 2001 by Lykke Andersen. It's one of the few cross-country studies on Latin America out there.
Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Peru come out on top with the highest estimated social mobility, while Guatemala, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador are at the bottom. Of course, these numbers are based on urban surveys and as such don't capture the whole reality of the countries in question, but they're nevertheless useful for broad comparisons.

But how does Latin America stack up against developed countries and in particular the US? This second graph below combines more recent and country specific estimates from Chile, Brazil and Peru with estimates for some developed countries.
In this case Chile, the UK and the US exhibit comparable levels of social mobility, which is either very flattering for Chile or very, very unflattering for the US and UK, the supposed bastions of liberal democracy and economic opportunity. Of course, note how far off these countries are from the more civilized nordic countries or Canada for that matter.

But it is worth mentioning that these numbers aren't comparable at all to the social mobility index in the previous graph--pointing to the shortcomings of consistent estimates noted above. Also, as someone who's lived in Canada, the US and Chile, I find these results very hard to believe. While the gap between Canada and the US makes perfect sense, such a small gap between Chile and the US is rather hard to swallow given the intense social stratification and pervasive class mentality anyone who's spent any time in Chile could tell you about.

Now, I'm obviously not saying this to defend the US, which clearly has very serious social mobility issues, but if these numbers come close to reality then Chile has made some serious social progress.

The Count

24...

...is the average number of years it'll take Latin American and Caribbean countries to achieve universal access to the most basic human services. Or at least according to the World Bank's 2010 Human Opportunity Index Report.

That's right, the new Human Opportunity Index report is out and it's pretty safe to say that it's a development-minded nerd's wet dream. The HOI is essentially a measure of access to basic services, including education, housing, water and electricity, taking into account how equitably or fairly these are distributed. Or, in the words of the World Bank's poverty reduction director, Marcelo Giugale:

"What we are measuring here is: are the doors of development open to all before the game starts?"

Countries get positive scores for higher coverage rates but get penalized for the inequality of coverage. If a country has a decent level of access to education but the bulk of those excluded belong to a particular marginalized social group, the country would earn a lower HOI score than a country with a similar level of access but more equitable distribution.

As can be seen below, the countries in the region with the top HOI are, in order, Chile (95), Uruguay (92), Mexico (90), Costa Rica (89) and Venezuela (89). Honduras is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, scoring a depressing score of 51.

[2010 Human Opportunity Index]

What's more, most countries have seen their HOI score grow significantly. Chile, for instance, went from 83 in 1996 t0 a score of 95 this year. The country with the fastest growing HOI, quite surprisingly, was Mexico, going from a low 65 in 1996 to its impressive 90 this year, an annual rate of 1.74.

Now this takes us to this week's count, 24, at the top. The average annual HOI growth rate for all of Latin America and the Caribbean is .99. At this rate it would take the region 24 years to achieve universal coverage of all the basic necessities, or an HOI score of 100. Put this way, the region still has a long way to go, despite all it's great progress lately (of course, this is based on the rather simple assumption that coverage increases linearly--at a steady rate).

But there's more sobering news in the report. The gap between rural and urban areas remains very large. What's interesting though is that this gap is smaller in countries with higher national HOI scores, suggesting the existence of what one might call an "opportunity spillover." Another thing to keep in mind is that Latin America and the Caribbean are still far from HOI levels observed in developed countries (with the exception of access to uncrowded living conditions in a few cases).

Also, the report decomposes the changes in the national HOI score into "compositional" and "scale" effects--that is, into how much of the change is due to an overall increase in coverage or to a fairer distribution of coverage. To quote the report:

"For all their efforts, LAC governments have, in general, not made much progress improving equity. Only a tenth of the average improvement in HOI is attributable to a fairer allocation of services, that is, to better social targeting of public expenditures."

In other words, most of the improvement in the HOI score is due to increases in the number of people covered, not the fairness of coverage. Moreover, this type of change can be in large part attributed to migration from rural to urban centers.

The Count: friday FDI wonkiness

40 to 50...

...is the percentage that foreign direct investment (FDI) to Latin America is expected to grow in 2010. After contracting sharply between 2008 and 2009 during the world financial crisis, FDI is expected to make a big comeback this year due largely to stronger than anticipated recovery across the region. Or at least according to Eclac's new annual report on FDI.

The climate of uncertainty, tight credit conditions, falling commodity prices and recessions across the world that followed Lehman's collapse caused FDI flows to Latin America to shrink a whopping 42% from 2008 to 2009. The biggest contractions, predictably, took place in countries that in the past have attracted the most FDI. For instance, flows to Brazil shrank $19 billion, a 42.4% decline. In Argentina, FDI flows contracted by $4.8 billion or by 49.6%.

But while in almost every country FDI, though slowing significantly, was still coming in, in Venezuela FDI just wanted to get the fuck out. In 2008 FDI inflows to Venezuela were just barely positive. And during 2009, Venezuela experienced net FDI outflows of $3.1 billion, a 990% decline! This was due mostly to the various nationalizations that took place in 2009.

But before we predict doom and gloom for the Venezuelan economy, we should remember that it's not exactly Greece, has plenty of oil cash lying around, and just signed a $20 billion deal with China to develop it's heavy crude refining capacity.

Whatever. In any case, the regional decline is indeed quite impressive. But why don't we put it in perspective? The graph below shows FDI flows to Latin America and the Caribbean between 1990 to 2009 in billions of dollars.

As can be seen, the lead up to the 2009 crisis was nothing short of an FDI bonanza. In fact, 2007 and 2008 were historical records for FDI. And even after its huge decline, FDI inflows in 2009 were still the 5th largest ever recorded. In other words, FDI flows to Latin America have wethered the crisis quite well, all things considered.

On a compositional note, the sharpest decline between 2008 to 2009 was in FDI flows to natural resource extraction. As can be seen below, this surged in 2008 coinciding with the large worldwide rise in commodity prices. The share of the service sector, the largest recipient of FDI, remained more or less at its 2008 level.But while FDI flows to the manufacturing sector retook the second place, its technological content remained weak. Moreover, Eclac notes that the technological content of FDI to Latin America has been low accross the board. This takes us to our final graph:
The graph above divides all announced FDI in Latin America into "low", "medium-low", "medium-high", and "high" technology content. As can be seen, low and medium-low dominate new FDI inflows.

This is a big problem because one of the biggest supposed benefits of FDI in textbook economic theory is that it transfers technology to developing countries, leading to positive "spillovers" into other industries and thus increasing overall productivity. Of course, no one seriously believes that FDI in and of itself leads to technology transfers and productivity growth. Smart developing countries, like China for instance, have always used industrial policy to harness FDI to suit their development strategies. It's a real shame that so many countries in Latin America have abandoned this type of thinking.

The Count: Cuban edition

[Editor's note: Wow, the Count has certainly been traveling a lot these past weeks! After going to China to investigate it's commercial ties with Latin America and flying to Europe to ask pissed off Greeks in the streets about their opinions of the IMF, the Count has finally come home to the Western Hemisphere. But without further ado, maladjusted brings you this week's Count.]

78.6...

...is the number of years the average Cuban is expected to live (unless they live in Miami, in which case all bets are off).

The current issue of the prestigious Science Magazine features an article (sorry, subscription-based) on the quality of health care in Cuba since Castro took power. We've all heard of Cuba's health care before, but now it turns out Michael Moore was right...according to scientists! In all seriousness though, Cuba has managed to achieve first world health levels on a third world budget and all while enduring the U.S. embargo, which restricted medicinal imports. From the article:

"Despite the embargo, Cuba has produced better health outcomes than most Latin American countries, and they are comparable to those of most developed countries. Cuba has the highest average life expectance (78.6 years) and density of physicians per capita (59 physicians per 10,000 people), and the lowest infant (5.0/1000 live births) and child (7.0/1000 live births) mortality rates among 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries."

Not bad. Not bad at all. The graph below shows average life expectancy in Cuba, Latin America, Canada and the U.S. Notice how fast average life expectancy increased and caught up to U.S. levels after the revolution. Since then, Cuban life expectancy has more or less been on par with that of the U.S. except for the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when aid to Cuba contracted sharply.
But how did Cuba achieve such good results in the face of the embargo while at the same time spending far less per person than the U.S. and most European countries? The article explains:

"Cuba has one of the most proactive primary health care systems in the world. By educating their population about disease prevention and health promotion, the Cubans rely less on medical supplies to maintain a healthy population. The converse is the United States, which relies heavily on medical supplies and technologies to maintain a healthy population, but at a very high cost."

Another side of the story, the article notes, is the government's emphasis on community access to health care and deliberate policies to tailor each local practice to the health profile of the community it serves. This, combined with universal coverage and free service, explains a lot of the outcome. To this I would add a more broader point: government priority. Specific strategies aside, what is most striking about Cuba's health outcomes is that no matter how many obstacles a country faces (such as, for instance, fending off the most powerful country in the world for five decades) it can provide free health care to all its citizens so long as it prioritizes their well being.

There's a lesson to be learned somewhere in there me thinks.

The Count: Goes to Greece

51...

...is the percent of Greeks who, in a recent poll, thought that going to the IMF for help would hurt their country. See, the IMF has done been so fucked up in so many places that the Greeks, as bad as it might be, don't want anything to do with them. The Greeks have already been getting a steady dose of maladjustment in the form of "belt tightening", and they know turning to the IMF means even more. So, as Reuters reports:

The poll by Public Issue for Skai TV showed that 51 percent see the IMF's involvement as harmful while only 27 percent think it would be beneficial.

"As regards other countries which borrowed from the IMF, 52 percent of those asked think they did not benefit, while 28 percent said they did," Skai TV said.

Only 47 percent of those asked said they trusted Prime Minister George Papandreou to handle the economy compared to 55 percent in a similar poll in February.

The poll showed that 87 percent of Greeks were worried about the country's public debt, which based on government projections will hit 120 percent of GDP this year.

A bigger percentage thinks the overborrowed country could go bankrupt compared to February -- 55 compared to 38 percent.

So let me get this right, they think the country is going to go bankrupt, they don't trust the Prime Minister and they are scared about the country's debt….AND THEY STILL DON'T WANT THE IMF! You hear that IMF?!

A breath of fresh air really….but food for thought, if the alternative is the EU, is that any better?

The Count: China edition

19.3...

...is the percentage of total Latin American and Caribbean exports that will go to China in the year 2020. And before you ask: no, maladjusted is NOT clairvoyant...... or at least not yet.

According to a study prepared by ECLAC the world's workshop will soon also surpass the European Union as the second largest destination for Latin America and the Caribbean's exports. The graph below shows the share of the region's exports that go to its top three markets. The key take away here is that over the last ten years the region is significantly less dependent on US markets than before and that China has rapidly become an important alternative destination for exports.

[Latin America and the Caribbean: top three export markets share of total 2000-2020 (percentages)]

Of course, the U.S. will continue to be the region's main export market but it's relative importance will have dropped tremendously, from 38.6 percent in 2009 to 28.4 by 2020. The EU's share will more or less stay the same while China's will continue its impressive increase, from 7.6 percent in 2009 to 19.3 in 2020.

Yes indeed, while the US and EU were stuck in a severe recession last year, China's economy still grew 8.7%. Also, while the value of exports to the US and EU plummeted 26 and 28 percent, respectively, the value of exports to China actually grew 5 percent.

Significantly, the assumptions underlying ECLAC's projections don't require Chinese demand for the region's products to continue growing at the same pace. As the report notes:

"If demand for our products in the United States, European Union and rest of the world continues to grow at its current pace, and assuming that Chinese demand only grows at half its current pace, China would surpass the European Union in 2014 and would become the second largest market for the region's exports."

As can be seen below, China already represents a key export market for many Latin American countries. 13% of Chile's exports go to China, followed by Peru, with 11% and Argentina, with 9%.

[Latin America and the Caribbean: Asia-Pacific country/regions average export shares 2006-2008]

But what's more, it attained this huge share of Latin American exports very, very, very quickly. Between, 2000 and 2008 it climbed from being Brazil's 12th largest export market to being number one. For Costa Rica it went from being 26th to second. Chile: from 5th to first. Colombia: 35th to fourth. Venezuela: 37th to third.

But there's a downside to this story. The pattern of trade between China and Latin America and the Caribbean is not very encouraging. With a few exceptions, the region is only exporting raw materials.

[Latin America and the Caribbean: technological content of exports to China, 1995-2008]

Not much of a clear trend in this one, except for that big blue space at the bottom. Yup, that shows the share of raw materials in total exports to China increasing.

So in the end, if these projections hold up, by 2020 Latin America and the Caribbean will be less dependent on US markets and much more dependent on Chinese ones. It would be nice if the moral of the story was that trade between developing countries meant a better pattern of trade for the region, but so far this doesn't seem to be the case. There are some exceptions though. For instance, virtually all of Costa Rica's exports to China are high-tech goods. Mexico also exports a large amount of high-tech manufacturing. But at the end of the day these are just exceptions.

The Count

38,700,000...

...is the dollar price tag on Evo's new presidential jet. That's right, Bolivia's prez is out shopping for a new Dassault Falcon 900.

But before you start jumping to the conclusion that the famously humble and austere prez is living it up, consider that the current presidential jet was bought back in 1975. Indeed, the decree authorizing the purchase cited "incidents that put in danger the lives of the head of state and those who accompany him, due to different technical malfunctions as well as a plane's normal wear and tear."

Also, $38.7 million isn't much when compared to high rollers like Brazil and Venezuela, with their big Airbus A319s (with average price tags of $70.3 million).

Now all that remains to be seen is what he'll name it. Any guesses?

The Count: a budding friday tradition

8,758...

...is the number of workers fired in Chile after the earthquake through a "force majeure" or "catastrophe" clause in the labor code.

Following the Feb. 27 earthquake businesses have been taking advantage of Article 159, N°6 of the labor code. This article allows employers to fire employees without paying severance packages by invoking force majeure reasons (acts of God) or catastrophes.

Now, obviously this type of policy makes sense and certainly many small businesses were completely decimated by the earthquake. But it is becoming clear that in many cases it has been abused and some businesses are simply using the earthquake as an excuse to get around labor standards.

These types of abuse have been limited in well unionized firms, but firms with weaker or no unions have essentially been able to do whatever they want. For instance, in some cases employers have fired workers through the force majeure clause only to rehire them with lower salaries.

CIPER has compiled another list of shame. This time it lists all the companies that have fired employees through Article 159. One revelation is that the company that has fired the most, 938, is owned by the Mayor of Santiago, Fernando Echeverría. As our readers may recall, Echeverría also owns a construction company responsible for a few of the buildings damaged during the earthquake and is a long time business buddy of president Piñera.

Chile's La Nación reported one of the more bizarre examples coming from the southern island of Chiloe, where one company actually went as far as to declare 90 of its workers dead as a pretext to fire them!

Long story short, the company first tried to fire them invoking force majeur. The problem was, however, that Chiloe was barely hurt by the earthquake at all, making the move somewhat suspicious. So, in a brilliantly sneaky move the company instead decided to claim that the 90 workers were dead.

But how could this possibly backfire? Well, a lawyer representing the 90 workers who lost their jobs had this to say:

"The workers are alive and kicking, so much so that they all accompanied me to the Labor Tribunal to file a complaint against the company."

We can only hope that this particularly shameless company will get what's coming to it.

The Count

18...

...Is the percent of lost GDP in Chile due to last month's earthquake. Today Chile's new Interior Minister gave the reconstruction effort a hefty $30 billion price tag, 3.6 to 4 billion of which will go to repairing the 14 hospitals across the country that were destroyed by the earthquake. The government also announced a revised tally of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami's casualties, which has reached 452 dead and 97 missing.

Yes indeed, much remains to be done and the debates over how to fund the reconstruction effort as well as holding construction companies accountable for damaged properties is in full force. The gov. is currently considering a proposal to pay for the reconstruction effort by raising royalty fees on mining companies. That's right, Piñera is contemplating going against his campaign promises in the interest of... common sense! And, of course, raising royalties on extractive industries pretty much makes him Evo Morales' BFF even more, no?

On a more serious note, Mr. Lorenzo "tower of pisa" Constans, the president of the Chilean Chamber of Construction (CCC), has issued a (sorta) mea culpa on behalf of Chile's construction companies for maybe kinda sorta possibly violating building codes:

"I'm not ruling out that at some stage, during the geological survey or during calculations or even the construction phase, there could've probably been an error."

Meanwhile, the CCC has signed an agreement with the metropolitan authorities of Santiago to provide the city with technicians to evaluate the damaged buildings and assess possible building code violations. In other words, under this agreement the same construction companies facing lawsuits will provide the city with experts in order to evaluate their own shitty collapsed buildings. What's more, as the excellent CIPER has dug up, the Mayor of Santiago, Fernando Echeverría, owns one of the construction companies in question, Echeverría Izquierdo, which built at least 3 of the damaged buildings. BEST. CONFLICT OF INTEREST. EVER.