Pricele #99: Beer (330ml) in Chile 🇨🇱

Beer is heavy, mostly water, and brewed close to where it is drunk, so a shop-bought bottle is a fairly clean read on local costs plus local excise duty. It is also the item where the shop and the bar diverge most: the same bottle carries a markup of three or four times once someone hands it to you across a counter, which is why this figure is the retail one.

Of the 42 countries priced for beer, Chile ranks #28 from the top at $0.75, 25% below the median of $1.00.

Chile is the most open economy in South America by tariff levels, so imported goods land closer to world prices here than in its neighbours, and the peso is a cleaner conversion than the Argentine or Colombian equivalent. The tax story is unusually simple: 19% IVA on essentially everything, with no reduced band for food, which is rare in Latin America and means the state takes the same cut of a bottle of beer as of a litre of diesel. Pump prices are smoothed by MEPCO, a stabilisation mechanism that damps the weekly moves other countries pass straight through.

See the full table for beer in every country or everything priced in Chile.