Report of the Sixth meeting of the Presiding Officers of the Regional Conference on Social Development in Latin America and the Caribbean

Report on the Ninth Ministerial Conference on the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8 Decent work and economic growth

Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.…

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 Life below water

Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.…

Latin America and the Caribbean in the Final Five Years of the 2030 Agenda: Steering Transformations to Accelerate Progress

Five years from the deadline for achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals  (SDGs) in Latin America and the Caribbean, progress has fallen short of expectations a decade ago when the journey began. Many factors have impeded better progress: weak institutional capacities, limited financing and fiscal space, low growth for major trading partners, the shock of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and subsequent cascading crises. In 2025, these factors have been compounded by geopolitical tensions and disruptions that may pose new obstacles for achievement of the SDGs, as well as new…

People of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean: An exploration of social and territorial realities in the rural world

The content of this document provides an analytical framework on the socioeconomic, political, legal situation of hundreds of Afro-descendant populations in rural areas in Latin America and the Caribbean, focused on the analysis of three key areas: territories, natural resources, and productivity. Contemporary demographic studies generally describe Afro-descendants as an urban phenomenon, a product of the rural-urban migrations that took place from the second half of the 19th century onwards, when the abolition of slavery began. However, there is a lack of discourse on Afro-descendant life in…

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17 Partnership for the goals

Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.…

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 Gender equality

Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.…

The influence of fiscal solvency on financial development: evidence for 140 countries, 1990–2020

If financial development facilitates economic development at the international level, as is the consensus view, then it follows that each government’s task is to implement policies that effectively boost national financial development. This study tests the new hypothesis that a more fiscally solvent policy approach positively influences financial development. The results, based on a yearly comparison, show that fiscal solvency, approximated by the credit rating on sovereign debt denominated in local currency, affects three dimensions of financial development: (i) the depth of credit leveraging…

Book review essay. The World That Latin America Created: the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era, by Margarita Fajardo

This book review essay analyses and builds on the work of Margarita Fajardo on the history of the establishment of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) and the growth and decline of its influence in the region and around the world in the two decades following its founding.…

Economic growth and productive sectors: recent empirical data on middle-income countries

This article examines how structural change affected economic growth in middle-income developing countries between 1960 and 2019, especially in Brazil (between 1948 and 2020), using the vector autoregression (VAR) model and panel data. The VAR model suggests that structural change in Brazil resulted in the services sector having a greater impact on economic growth owing to the transfer of resources from high-productivity sectors to low-productivity sectors, which reduced the rate of economic growth. Panel data suggest that economic growth in the sample of countries continues to be heavily infl…

Editorial note

On the measurement of growth over the long run

Methodologies for the construction of nominal and real gross domestic product (GDP) time series often differ over time and between countries. This paper discusses the main issues raised by this methodological heterogeneity for long-run measures of economic growth and, informed by these issues, provides a set of internationally comparable GDP estimates from 1820 to 2020. The estimates are based on real product benchmarks relative to the United Kingdom as the reference economy. The GDP time series of the reference economy is a normalized composite of several indices. These estimates suggest that…

CEPAL Review No. 145

Empirical evidence for Okun’s law in Colombia: an analysis of rural areas at the region level

This article analyses the relationship between income and unemployment, controlling for the variable of human capital, in rural areas of four Colombian regions. The objective is to test for the existence of the empirical regularity known as Okun’s law and thereby measure income’s impact on unemployment by region. The analysis is based on a monthly series for the period 2010–2022, and the methodologies used to determine the behaviour of this relationship include ordinary least square differences, dynamic ordinary least squares, and error correction and vector autoregressive models, establishing…

The road to the 2025 Second World Summit for Social Development: towards a pact for inclusive social development

Since the establishment of the United Nations, various intergovernmental agreements and international human rights instruments have expressed the ambition of achieving social development, which is central to the multilateral system. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) stressed the importance of well-being and, implicitly, of improved quality of life, both of which are linked to the rights to social security, work, an adequate standard of living, education and health. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966) broadened…

Long-term effects of real exchange rate volatility and institutional quality on economic complexity

This article analyses whether real exchange rate volatility and institutional quality, combined as conditioning variables of the productive specialization of economies, can have a negative impact on a country’s ability to achieve greater economic sophistication, especially in countries with a commodity-dominated and natural resource-based export basket. The methodology used consists of panel cointegration estimation (pooled mean group) using data from 1995 to 2018 for a sample of 54 countries. The results indicate that real exchange rate volatility is indeed an obstacle to the implementation o…

Prices and progress? The link between inflation and structural change in post-war Brazil

This paper employs a multivariate time series model to examine the relationship between price increases and structural change in post-war Brazil (1945–1964). To assess this relationship, the model investigates the link between prices, the industrial share of total output in the economy, net investment and industrial sector wages. With a view to addressing criticisms commonly made of the vector autoregression (VAR) family of models, and particularly the ad hoc nature of Cholesky’s decomposition method, hypotheses drawn from the economic literature on development theory were applied to the matri…

Impact of the peace negotiations in Colombia on real GDP, 2013–2019

The peace negotiations between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia –People’s Army and the Government of Colombia, which began in late 2012 and concluded with the signing of the Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace in 2016, sought to bring an end to decades of violence, loss of life, destruction of infrastructure and social fragmentation. This study uses the synthetic control method proposed by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller (2010) to assess the impact of the Agreement on Colombia’s real per capita GDP growth, …

Latin America and the Caribbean looking ahead to the Second World Summit for Social Development: proposals for inclusive social development

The overarching objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development —ending poverty and hunger and reducing inequality— are long-held priorities of the region and particularly salient in the work of the Regional Conference on Social Development in Latin America and the Caribbean. The region’s countries have cooperated to achieve these objectives since the establishment of the Regional Conference as a subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in 2014. The Regional Agenda for Inclusive Social Development, adopted by the Regional Confe…