Chilean President Kast announces 40-measure economic reform package

Chilean President José Antonio Kast announced Wednesday a legislative reform package comprising more than 40 measures aimed at breaking what he characterized as a cycle of economic stagnation and restoring stronger growth.

In a nationally televised address, Kast outlined reforms centered on five main goals: improving Chile's tax competitiveness, strengthening formal employment, simplifying regulations, increasing legal and regulatory certainty, and restraining public spending. The package includes a significant corporate tax reduction that has been rejected by the left-wing opposition.

"We are going to break with a state that spends more than it has. We are going to break the bureaucracy that paralyzes and suffocates investment. We are going to break everything that is bad to rebuild everything that is good," Kast said during the address.

"In the coming days, we will submit to Congress the economic reconstruction and development bill," Kast stated. "We did not arrive here to repeat the previous cycle, we arrived to break it."

Kast, who took office in March, had promised before assuming power that he would install an "emergency government." Among his initial economic measures, he reduced current spending in ministries, halted environmental decrees that his government said could affect employment, and made a drastic adjustment to a fund designed to cushion fuel price volatility. That adjustment caused fuel prices to spike by up to 60 percent.

The president said Chile must return to robust growth and job creation. He did not provide specific timelines or detailed implementation plans for the individual measures within the reform package during the address.