Charlie Rose Talks to Chilean President Sebastián Piñera

Can Chile maintain its 6 percent growth rate?
We can. It’s not easy. It needs a lot of commitment and effort. We have been able, for instance, to increase investment as a percentage of GNP from 21 percent to 26 percent in the last three years and to promote innovation and entrepreneurship and invest much more—we’re almost doubling our investment rate in science and technology. We want to keep growing at 6 percent, and we need to grow at 6 percent, because if we do that, before the end of this decade, Chile might become the first—though hopefully not the only—Latin American country able to defeat poverty and overcome underdevelopment.

According to Deutsche Bank, Chile’s the world’s first solar power producer to be subsidy-free. How did you do that?
Chile was very poor in terms of old sources of energy—gas, oil, coal. But we’re extremely rich in the future sources of clean, renewable energy. For instance, we have the deserts with the highest solar variance in the world. And they’re on a plateau, so there’s no dust. Therefore the capacity to produce solar energy is incredible. It’s becoming competitive. We’re not doing what the Spaniards did. They subsidized everyone, then they couldn’t afford it.