GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala – The executive director of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, says this region continues to be the most unequal one on earth.
from left to right: Ignez Tristao, IDB Country Representative in Guatemala; Bernardo Arévalo de León, President of Guatemala; and José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, Executive Secretary of ECLACAddressing an international conference organized by ECLAC and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on “Keys to Overcoming Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean,” Salazar-Xirinachs said the event, which ends later on Tuesday, is being held at a critical time.
“Our region continues to be the most unequal one on earth. This structural and multidimensional inequality not only affects income distribution, it is also manifested in access to education, to quality jobs, to social services, to health, to social protection and to so many other dimensions of human well-being.”
Salazar-Xirinachs said that ECLAC has conceptualized this reality as a trap of high inequality, low mobility and weak social cohesion.
“This trap comes alongside and is interrelated with two others that we have been insisting on, which are the trap of low capacity for growth and transformation, and another one involving low institutional capacity and ineffective governance. These three traps hinder progress towards more inclusive social development, with greater mobility and social cohesion,” he added.
The principal advisor to the Vice Presidency for Sectors and Knowledge at the IDB, Mariano Bosch, said that inequality is a complex problem that requires an agreed-upon, collective and coordinated effort by the entire society.
“We at the Inter-American Development Bank support Latin American and Caribbean countries with knowledge, resources and technical experience to help design and implement public policies that would allow for overcoming poverty and inequality in our region and generating true progress in conjunction with the private sector.”
According to ECLAC’s data, Latin America and the Caribbean grew just 0.9 percent per year on average in the 2014-2023 decade. This is less than the two percent rate at which it grew in the infamous lost decade of the 1980s.
That is why ECLAC has dubbed it the “second lost decade,” and flags the work that must be done in order to avert a third one.
“And it is not just a lost decade in terms of growth, but also in terms of poverty reduction and quality job creation – two dimensions that are closely related to growth,” said Salazar-Xirinachs.
“After having managed to slash poverty from levels of 50 percent in the early 1990s to 27 percent in 2014, it stalled precisely around 2014-15, when the second lost decade began. And something similar occurred with the creation of quality employment, the growth rate of which between 2014 and 2023 was the lowest in six decades,” Salazar-Xirinachs explained.
In light of this, the ECLAC senior official shared seven public policy guidelines for reducing inequality, increasing social mobility and strengthening social cohesion in the region.
He said the first is to make progress on a new generation of productive development policies, followed by implementing effective redistributive fiscal policies as well as promoting strong social and social protection policies.
Salazar-Xirinachs said strengthening educational systems from early childhood on and throughout the life cycle, along with broad access to vocational training; moving towards gender equality and the care society as well as strengthening urban planning and management policies and producing quality information that would enable continual measurement of the multiple dimensions of inequality should be pursued.
The two-day meeting here marks the start of the United Nations Development Account project “Labour inclusion to address climate change and its impacts on the future of work in Latin America and the Caribbean,” implemented by ECLAC.
The regional seminar aims to have participants conduct diagnostics and analyze innovative solutions that would allow for transforming the region’s historical and structural challenges into engines of economic growth and more productive, inclusive and sustainable development.
