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, 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. these figures are similar to those presented in previous years, reflecting that the board has not changed its view on the medium - term productive capacity of the chilean economy. however, we cannot ignore the fact that, because in recent years the growth rates of investment and productivity have been below their trend levels, short - term productive capacity has suffered. actually, the board estimates that the potential growth of the economy is now around 2. 5 %, a little short of previous estimates. adjustments to the monetary policy making process another area where we are making progress is in the transparency and communication of our monetary policy decisions. the bank conducts its monetary policy in an inflation targeting framework, which, to function correctly needs to properly communicate its actions and the reasons behind them, as well as a good diagnosis of the evolution of the economy, locally and internationally. the adoption of these decisions and their communication are structured around the monetary policy meetings and the monetary policy report, whose organization, priority, content and dissemination are currently based on procedures and standards that were mostly established in the first half of the 2000s. after a thorough internal assessment based on accumulated experience and international best practices, the

. at the same time, core inflation is subdued. as a result, monetary policy is accommodative. and with official interest rates effectively at zero, this accommodative setting is being achieved through expansion of central bank balance sheets. bis central bankers ’ speeches but from another perspective, what we are seeing is highly unusual. since mid 2008, four of the world's major central banks – the federal reserve, the ecb, the bank of japan and the bank of england – have all expanded their balance sheets very significantly, and further increases have been announced in a couple of cases ( graph 3 ). in total, the assets of these four central banks have already increased by the equivalent of around $ us5 trillion, or around 15 per cent of the combined gdp of the relevant economies. we have not seen this type of planned simultaneous very large expansion of central bank balance sheets before. so in that sense, it is very unusual, and its implications are not yet fully understood. this type of monetary expansion is supposed to work through a number of mechanisms. at the risk of oversimplifying things, i want to focus on just two of these. the first is that it increases the prices of assets that the central bank is buying, thus lowering the yields on those assets. with the fed, the bank of japan, and the bank of england all buying their own government ’ s bonds, it is hardly surprising that yields on those bonds are at very low levels ( graph 4 ). similarly, in europe, the prospect of the ecb buying the bonds of troubled sovereigns has seen yields on those bonds decline. also, in the united states, the fed ’ s decision to purchase mortgage - backed securities has seen the yields on those securities fall. in general, these lower yields should help provide some boost to spending, just as would lower interest rates from more conventional policy. the second mechanism is through asset allocation decisions, as banks and investors adjust their portfolios following the sale of assets to the central bank. these sales lead to an increase in the balances that banks hold at the central bank. in addition, where the ultimate seller of the assets is a non - bank, they also lead to an increase in bank deposits. at some point, the institutions holding these higher balances, which earn zero or very low interest rates, could be expected to conclude that there were other assets somewhere in the world that earned a risk - adjusted return above zero. as institutions seek