ECLAC improved its growth projection for Latin America in 2021 to 4.1%

The countries of Latin America will register an average expansion of 4.1%, insufficient to offset the impact of the decline in gross domestic product (GDP) last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, ECLAC said on Thursday.

The new estimate improves on the last one, made last December by the same commission based in Santiago de Chile, which forecast growth of 3.7%.

“The region contracted by 7.1% in 2020; it will grow by 4.1% this year, but it will not be enough to return to the level of pre-pandemic activity ”, declared the Executive Secretary of ECLAC, Alicia Bárcena, presenting a special edition of the magazine of the institution entitled “COVID-19 and the socio-economic crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean”.

The expected recovery, added Bárcena, will however take place in a context of a lot of “uncertainty”.

“Unequal access to vaccines, vaccination processes and their effectiveness, which are not guaranteed, opens us great uncertainties about the future“, He explained.

In addition, the process of economic recovery Latin America, the region most affected by the pandemic and also the most damaged in economic and social terms, “can be asymmetrical, divergent and generate more gaps”.

The strong impact of the pandemic in the region – which has generated an unprecedented number of 44 million unemployed “This is due to long-standing structural factors that presaged his dysfunctional developmental style,” according to Bárcena junto from Mario Cimoli, Deputy Executive Secretary of CEPAL, in one of the magazine’s articles.

Therefore, the authors add, economic recovery “should lead, at the same time, to important structural, productive, fiscal and institutional reforms, to move forward in the configuration of a new style of inclusive and sustainable development ”.

Education, also in decline

The serious socio-economic crisis of COVID-19 also represents an educational setback of eight to ten years in Latin America, where some 17 million students in the final years of high school and the first years of university will drop out of school., according to estimates by the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI).

The figure is mainly composed of children from low-income families who become poorer and, unable to pay school fees or support their families without their jobs, will return home to “help.” They are mainly women from suburban and rural populations, warns the Secretary General of the OEI for education, science and culture, Mariano Jabonero.

Those who do not return to secondary or higher education they need more school, he underlines, “it is their only means, an opportunity for social and professional advancement”. And the OEI urges the ministers of education to get them back and “they don’t stay on the streets”.

This will make the dropping out of school in the region, with some countries where one in three students leaves school after reaching secondary school; others, even in elementary school.

With information from AFP and EFE

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