SANTIAGO, Chile – The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has “exposed” inequalities and highlight social problems affecting the Caribbean.
“Bárcena”According to Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), COVID-19 has “exposed and accentuated the social problems that, unfortunately, characterize our region, such as poverty and inequality.”
ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena, in an address to the 19th meeting of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas (SCA) late last month, said poverty will rise 37.3 percent, affecting 231 million people, and an estimated 98 million people will live in extreme poverty.
ECLAC is also forecasting greater inequality in income distribution in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The SCA meeting was attended by 39 delegations from ECLAC’s member-states and 11 associate members.
INCREASE
ECLAC said that the Gini index, which measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country, is seen to be increasing between one percent and eight percent in the 17 countries studied.
“The pandemic has clearly shown that inequality, a problem that ECLAC has insisted on repeatedly for more than a decade, is not only to be found in academic or technical discourse but instead has concrete and degrading consequences in people’s lives,” Bárcena said.
She said that the precariousness of social protection systems has left “millions of people adrift who, faced with the termination of their jobs, have had to resort to other alternatives for subsistence, unable to respect social distancing measures and exposing themselves to the pandemic’s risks.”
Bárcena urged countries to continue moving towards “more comprehensive ways of measuring well-being and of rendering social gaps visible through statistical information disaggregated by characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, age group, place of residence and disabilities, so as to leave no one behind.
