In this context, the Board of the CBC has kept the monetary policy interest rate (MPR) at 2.5% and in the baseline scenario it expects to maintain a significant monetary impulse throughout the next two years, with an MPR that, in baseline scenario conditions, should 1  remain around its current levels and start approaching neutrality only when the economy begins to close the activity gap. Now, let me describe in further detail what we estimate to be the most likely macroeconomic scenario for the coming quarters and its related risks. At July, annual CPI inflation descended to 1.7%, thus accumulating a sharper fall than was foreseen in June. Its core component has evolved in line with forecasts, to near 2% annually, and continues to reflect slightly negative annual variation rates for goods inflation, and above 3% for services (figure 1). The evolution of the more volatile prices, particularly of fresh fruits and vegetables, has been a major factor in inflation falling below expectations. This is mainly associated with the unusual seasonal behavior that some products exhibited this year. Going forward, these prices are expected to be in line with historic patterns and help bring inflation to the target. Still, by their nature, these products can always be a source of inflationary surprises. In the second quarter, GDP rose 0.9% annually, with other sectors growing 1.1%, less than expected in June. The economy was affected by significant differences in the number of days worked, including an irrevocable holiday in April, whose impact was higher than estimated.
Indeed, the data show that, beyond the difficulty of calculating productivity by sector, the negative effect of the decline of mining ore has taking its toll on this industry (figure 12). The evidence from Chile suggests that there are important inefficiencies in resource allocation across firms and that there would be first order gains from measures aimed at improving them, which, unlike the case of human capital, could generate gains sooner. To back this last analysis, the document provides some international comparisons on productivity, microeconomic evidence on how the productivity of firms evolves, and its degree of dispersion. In particular, from a comparative perspective, although Chile's productivity appears to be aligned with its GDP per capita, it is about 60% that of the United States and less than that of the richer OECD countries, which implies that there is great room for improvement (figure 13). In Chile, as in many other economies, there appear to be significant gains from fostering a better allocation of productive resources, helping the more efficient firms to grow and the less efficient to shrink and eventually exit the market. As can be seen in table 3, 9  resource reallocation is an important source of TFP growth. For this, it is essential to have flexible labor markets that allow adjusting the endowment of companies when necessary, developing the financial system to direct resources to where the good ideas are and implement rules that facilitate the creation and dissolution of companies.