“…Since the Constitution of Portales in 1833, the first after the independence of the country, the extremely centralised institutional framework of Chile has tended to maintain historical patterns of location and led to urban primacy indexes that are amongst the highest in the world (Aroca & Atienza, 2016). The current regionalisation of the country was centrally imposed by the Pinochet’s dictatorship (Boisier, 2000) and regional administrators (intendentes) are still appointed by the President, and the degree of administrative, political and fiscal decentralisation is amongst the lowest in Latin America, limiting the possibility of designing bottom‐up regional development strategies (OECD, 2017; Valenzuela et al., 2019). The combination of a neoliberal economic model, that limits public intervention, and a centralist model of political, fiscal, and administrative administration places Chile in a unique situation compared to other OECD and Latin American countries, with a very weak total public expenditure (as a percentage of GDP) as well as a low level of subnational spending (as a percentage of total public expenditure) (Irarrazabal & Rodríguez, 2018; OECD, 2017; Ruano de la Fuente & Vial Cossani, 2016).…”