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The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), known as Cepal, has revised its growth forecast for Chile downward to 1.6%, signaling continued economic challenges despite recent positive indicators. The adjustment comes amid conflicting data showing mixed signals about the country's economic health. While June’s Imacec index, a key measure of economic activity, showed a 2.4% annual increase and a 0.6% rise compared to May, the National Accounts revealed a less encouraging picture with a 0.2% decline in GDP during the second quarter year-on-year, alongside stagnant investment and four consecutive quarters of contraction in mining. These contrasting figures highlight the complexity of assessing Chile’s economic trajectory. A strong month can exist simultaneously with an economy whose long-term growth trend has been weakening for years. Since the early 1990s, Chile had gradually narrowed the gap with higher-income economies, but this progress slowed significantly at the start of the last decade. Multiple factors have contributed to this shift, including the end of a previous commodities boom, reduced workforce momentum, declining investment and productivity, regulatory changes, tax reforms, and the disappearance of an unusually favorable external environment. Pinpointing one specific cause for the stagnation is therefore insufficient. A more fruitful approach involves examining not just how much resources Chile mobilizes, but how effectively it transforms them into additional productive capacity. Conventional economic explanations identify real obstacles such as excessively lengthy permits that raise costs and delay projects, uncertainty affecting investment decisions, taxes altering returns, inadequate competition hindering entry for more efficient firms, and poor allocation of capital and labor reducing productivity. Correcting these distortions could boost investment and growth. However, this explanation reaches its limits when attempting to account for a prolonged slowdown. Even attributing it solely to weak productivity leaves open the central question: productivity encompasses diverse phenomena ranging from technology, quality of capital and labor, reallocation, scale, organization, and learning. Its weakness itself requires further explanation. Clues may lie in the activities that sustained much of Chile’s export success over decades. Copper mining, forestry, salmon farming, and various agricultural export sectors accumulated capital, infrastructure, knowledge, suppliers, and markets. Precisely because of this success, many of their initial expansion sources have become harder to replicate today. In copper mining, lower ore grades and increased demands for water, energy, and infrastructure require substantial resources to maintain and expand production. In the forestry sector, territorial expansion faces physical, environmental, and social constraints. In salmon farming, increasing biomass encounters sanitary and ecological limits. In agricultural exports, availability of water, climate change, labor, and international competition raise requirements for continued growth. This does not indicate the exhaustion of these sectors. Rather, the change is more precise: the next stage of growth will likely struggle to reproduce the previous one. Where expanding surface area, extraction, biomass, or installed capacity previously generated significant increases in output, new gains will require different strategies and innovations. The challenge now lies not merely in expanding existing platforms but in using them to produce the next generation of capabilities. This transition underscores the need for structural transformation and innovation to sustain future growth.