PuroChile › Divisions

The space of activities

Two activities are close when the communes that are good at one tend also to be good at the other. That is the whole definition, and it is computed from 500-worker activities across the 296 communes with enough formal employment for a share to mean anything. Nothing in it knows about technology, supply chains or geography.

This page describes a position and never recommends one. Which corner of it is worth being in depends on what a place wants and what it can afford, and neither is in a tax register.

What goes with what

492 activities · 525 links

Natural resourcesIndustry and constructionTrade and logisticsAdvanced servicesState and social servicesOther services

The drawing has no axes because its axes mean nothing: the positions come from a method that is free to rotate the plane, so what it says is near and far. Size is how many people work in the activity in Chile; colour is the family of its branch, the same hue it wears in every treemap on this site. The lines are the strongest links plus the ones needed for nothing to float alone.

Rare and widespread

In fewest communes

How many of the communes above the floor are specialised in each. An activity almost nobody is specialised in is not thereby a good thing to have — it is a rare one.

In most communes

The other end: the work that is over-represented almost everywhere, which is mostly the work a place needs in order to be a place.

Where each commune sits

296

Ordered by the average complexity of the activities each commune is specialised in. It is an ordering and not a quantity: the numbers are standard deviations, and a commune is not twice anything at twice the figure. The communes below the floor of formal workers are not here at all, because a share of a payroll of eighty people divides into a statement about eighty people.

Commune	Activities it is specialised in	Formal workers	Average complexity
Santiago	118	955,092	0.56
Las Condes	142	1,384,930	0.42
Pudahuel	108	128,850	0.29
Providencia	130	849,949	0.27
Renca	109	61,393	0.26
Conchalí	82	42,245	0.26
Macul	109	54,700	0.23
Ñuñoa	73	214,124	0.19
Quilicura	114	220,300	0.18
San Joaquín	115	27,157	0.18
San Miguel	114	64,023	0.18
Huechuraba	88	290,286	0.16
Cerrillos	83	45,087	0.14
Quinta Normal	141	41,758	0.14
La Reina	121	36,236	0.11
Independencia	105	44,229	0.10
La Cisterna	126	25,383	0.10
Estación Central	98	65,136	0.09
Recoleta	118	71,860	0.06
Viña del Mar	121	202,788	0.01

Revealed comparative advantage (Balassa, 1965) and the space of activities (Hidalgo, Klinger, Barabási and Hausmann, 2007), computed on formal employment rather than exports because employment is what a Chilean commune has. Every input is a count the SII published — headcounts are never withheld at this depth — and every output is arithmetic on those counts, with nothing imputed: an activity a commune does not have is a zero the register published, not a gap. The register files a firm at its tax address, so a commune can appear specialised in work that physically happens elsewhere. The checks are here.