Francisca Penna, MA’07
Growing Up With Chile’s Economy
On January 11, 2010, the Chilean Finance Minister signed an agreement to make his country the 31st member of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD).
The event was held at La Moneda Palace in Santiago, and recognized 20 years of democratic and economic reform. As the first nation welcomed to the prestigious organization in more than a decade—and the first South American country in history—Chile celebrated the end to the long road of negotiations since it first expressed interest in joining the OECD almost 15 years ago.
For Francisca Penna, MA’07, January 11th meant all this and more. It was also the day that 36 months of painstaking labor finally paid off.
As advisor for international affairs to Chile’s Ministry of Finance, Penna helped coordinate the country’s application to OECD. Founded more than 50 years ago, the organization gathers the world’s most developed countries to set standards and design policies in order to improve the national economies of its members. Its selection process is grueling at best—Estonia, Israel, Slovenia, and the Russian Federation are still navigating their way through negotiations—and Penna was deep in the trenches.
“It took a year and a half just to get the documents in order,” she says.
In these documents, Penna worked with a team to explain regulations in Chile, particularly in areas of investment and financial services, and answered the seemingly endless questions by evaluating OECD members about exactly how things work within her country.
Penna was raised in Santiago, alongside a sprouting Chilean economy that has seen constant growth for two decades. A strong student of mathematics with a love of the social sciences, Penna was all but primed for a career in economics as early as high school. She studied it at the University of Chile and, after completing a year as a foreign exchange student at UC Davis, she enrolled in a dual degree public policy master’s program with the University of Chile and the Harris School of Public Policy Studies.
In addition to the analytical training she gained in the classroom, Penna says studying at the Harris School taught her how to construct large, complex documents in English, a skill that sets her apart from many peers at home who didn’t receive opportunities to study abroad. She’d also be the first to admit that the Harris School degree was instrumental in helping her land a position at the Ministry of Finance.
“One of the main reasons I got the job was because I had a master’s degree at one of the top universities in the world,” she says. “That was a really important thing for my boss.”
Penna remembers how the University of Chicago let her to take courses in departments outside of the Harris School, where she got to work alongside students from various cultural and academic backgrounds. It’s a skill she uses daily.
Since the 1990s, Chile has become a world leader in free trade. For Penna, a typical workday at the Ministry of Finance includes participating in these FTA negotiations and feasibility studies for countries like Vietnam, China, Brazil, Israel, and Indonesia. She flew to Malaysia and Uruguay last year to negotiate FTAs — a role she also performed in Chile’s agreement with Turkey signed last July.
She also serves on a committee of eight members from different ministries in Chile that receives petitions from local industries concerned about international commerce. One recently raised concerns that Argentine and Uruguayan government subsidies were making it impossible for Chilean milk farmers to compete at home. After an investigation, the committee recommended that Chile temporarily raise tariffs 15 percent for certain dairy products imported from these countries until the international price leveled with the internal cost—a recommendation the Chilean president acted on last October.
When Penna tells this story, her voice fills with pride. It serves as an early, and humbling, reminder in her short career of public service that diligent analysis can impact lives.
“It’s amazing to work in a ministry that makes decisions in the country,” she says. “It feels like a lot of responsibility, but it’s the best place I could be working right now.”
By Steven Yaccino
