MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Latin America has diminished poverty indexes but deep inequality gaps remain

Heraldo Muñoz, head of the UN development program for Latin America

Latin America has experienced significant advances in the reduction of poverty but has barely improved the deep social inequalities that limit its development according to Heraldo Muñoz, head of the regional UN Program for Development.

Compared to the crises in developed countries such as the EU and US Latin America “is enjoying quite a positive economic situation” but the region faces three major challenges it needs to address: inequality, rampant crime and the problems with the quality of democracies and governance.

“Latin America last year expanded 6% and this year anywhere from 4% to 4.5%, double forecasts for the EU and US. The outlook is relatively optimistic although if the crises in the developed countries become deeper the region could be affected since the continent is not immune to these effects, it’s not isolated or living in a bubble”.

“Inequality continues to be a major challenge; the region is the world’s most unequal and of the 15 countries with the most unfair wealth distribution, ten belong to Latin America”, said Muñoz.

Latin America also faces crimes and urban insecurity and if the region represents 9% of world population, it carries 27% of all homicides, said the UN top official.

Regarding his third point, political representation Muñoz said that “on the one hand we have a consolidated electoral democracy, and this year we are looking ahead to six presidential elections, but there is also a problem of quality with democracies and governance”.

Nevertheless Muñoz admits the good macroeconomics growth data are not only numbers: “there are concrete conditions of improvement” for local populations.

Most Latin American countries have managed to diminish poverty percentages which means people have managed to climb out of poverty and joined the lower middle class plus the chance of building a better future for them and for their children.

“One out of six Latin Americans are sheltered by some program of conditional transfers: families receive special allowances if they send their children to school and to clinics for medical checkups”.

Among those Muñoz mentioned Bolsa Familia in Brazil; Opportunities in Mexico; Solidarity in the Dominican Republic or Chile Solidario.

“But even when poverty is down it is also very much true that inequality of incomes gap continues to be very wide to which we must add gender, ethnic and territorial inequalities”, underlined Muñoz.