SANTIAGO, Chile (CMC) — The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) says the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has “exposed and accentuated the social problems that, unfortunately, characterise our region, such as poverty and inequality”.
Addressing the 19th meeting of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas (SCA), ECLAC’s executive secretary, Alicia Bárcena, said that poverty is projected to rise 37.3 per cent as a result of COVID, affecting 231 million people. An estimated 98 million people will live in extreme poverty.
ECLAC is forecasting greater inequality in income distribution in Latin America and the Caribbean. Citing the Gini index, which measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country, the commission said the incidence is seen to be increasing between one and eight per cent 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.”
In this context, 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”.
“We need to create instruments that account for the perceptions that people have about their own well-being and experiences and incorporate subjective elements into our notion of well-being,” she said.
“We must have a more complete measurement of people’s income and wealth in order to institute better public policies for reducing inequality in economic resources. We need to make progress on information systems that integrate statistics with geography and would enable us to visualise where the phenomena that interest us are taking place.”
Bárcena warned that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the risk of not achieving compliance with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), “which was already showing uneven progress in the region”.
Bárcena said that an analysis of 72 statistical series of the 17 SDGs’ indicators for the region, “it can be seen that four targets have been met; there are 15 that will likely be fulfilled, based on the current trend; eight need more public policy intervention; 13 require strong public policy intervention; 27 are at a standstill; and five are suffering setbacks”.
In the case of Caribbean countries, she said the pandemic is occurring at a time “when they already face major challenges for achieving the SDGs, due to their greater vulnerability to external crises and high levels of indebtedness, combined with greater exposure to climate change and external climate events, which means that additional efforts beyond what has already been done will be required”.
Bárcena said that, for follow-up on the SDGs, ECLAC has created the “Regional knowledge management platform for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG Gateway),” which serves as a meeting and reference point for all information related to the SDGs, including activities, informational resources, statistics, regional data, specific analytical instruments and knowledge products developed and made available by the United Nations in response to member countries’ needs.
The SCA meeting, which ends on Thursday, is being attended by 39 delegations from ECLAC member states and 11 associate members. It is expected to analyse the challenges of COVID-19 “as an opportunity to strengthen the role of national statistical offices”.
