During its ten years of existence, the Ibero-American Network of Climate Change Offices (RIOCC, according to its Spanish initials) has contributed to supporting the fight against climate change by promoting cooperation and coordination among its 21 member countries, senior government officials from the region said during a special event that was held on December 11 in the framework of the 20th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 20), which is taking place in Lima, Peru.
Participants in the gathering—which celebrated the RIOCC’s 10th anniv…
(September 25, 2014) The Brazilian poet Thiago de Mello called on people throughout Latin America to work for cultural integration during a talk he gave on Wednesday, September 24, at the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile.
"I call on everyone, and particularly the ECLAC, to participate in working towards the cultural integration of all of our peoples, because we still don't know each other well," the prominent artist said to an audience of special guests that included scholars, officials from international organizations, dipl…
(21 August, 2014) Today the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, welcomed senior Chilean authorities including Minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, Ximena Rincón; President of the Senate, Isabel Allende; and Senator Hernán Larraín to the headquarters for the launch of Chile’s Action Plan for Open Government 2014-2016.
The most senior ECLAC official welcomed the fact that 15 of the region’s countries, including Chile, have adopted commitments to improve transparency and citizen participation within the Open…
In recent years, ECLAC has received official requests from governments in the region for technical assistance for designing and implementing industrial policies. In response, the Commission has developed and applied a methodology based on value chains, which has enabled it to identify targeted intervention strategies, with clear, coordinated lines of action.
Value chains can be strengthened by supporting all their stakeholders, especially small producers, which in turn helps to close structural gaps. In 2013, ECLAC worked jointly with governments and the private sector in Central America to st…
(October 30, 2014) The Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, concluded on Tuesday, October 28 a two-day visit to Cuba, where she met with the President of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, Raúl Castro, as well as other high-level authorities from that country. She also gave a keynote lecture at the University of Havana.
The senior ECLAC official was welcomed by the President, with whom she discussed the common will to deepen cooperation between the United Nations regional organization and Cuba’s Government. …
(2 September 2014) The Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, today became the first Latin American woman to be awarded an honoris causa doctorate by the University of Oslo, Norway, along with another 16 men and women from various disciplines and nationalities.
The most senior representative of ECLAC, speaking to an audience made up of university officials, academics and students, stated "When I obtained my biology degree at the Science Faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in the 1970s, I would not h…
(20 August 2014) According to experts speaking today at the opening of the 5th Regional seminar on agriculture and climate change organized by ECLAC and FAO, supported by French Cooperation and sponsored by IICA and Oxfam (United Kingdom), it is vital to acknowledge the traditional knowledge accumulated by family farmers and native peoples, as well as to learn from that knowledge in order to adapt to climate change.
The event, whose theme is "agrobiodiversity, family farming and climate change", is being attended by officials from the region's ministries of agriculture and planning, agricultur…
In Buenos Aires on 24 and 25 April, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) held a Seminar-workshop on production structure, institutions and economic dynamics, which was attended by Deputy Executive Secretary, Antonio Prado.
The meeting was also attended by the Director of the Buenos Aires Office, Martín Abeles, various other ECLAC officials and economists working in universities, research centres and public institutions in Argentina.
Antonio Prado stated that "macroeconomic policy must be linked with the development process".
According to the senior ECLAC of…
To provide a space for reflection on public policies related to climate change, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) will hold a seminar this Thursday and Friday, May 29-30, in Quito, Ecuador, called "Public Policies in the Face of Climate Change: Pro-development Measures, Environmental Tax Reforms and Progress on Universal Social Protection in Latin America."
The event-which will take place in the framework of the EUROCLIMA Program, funded by the European Union-will be attended by government officials and international experts from Europe and Latin America. The …
Road sector authorities and experts from 35 countries will gather until Friday, October 31, at the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile to analyze the sector’s challenges on the path towards sustainable development.
The officials will analyze along with various industry actors the general issues and main trends in construction and highway management, as well as transportation facilitation, the mitigation of its external impacts and the functioning of public-private alliances.
The meeting of the Council of the World Road Associat…
(9 October 2014) "The greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change are ever greater and mitigation commitments, above all in developed countries but also in emerging economies, are not enough to stabilize climate conditions," the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, warned at the start of two meetings at the organization's headquarters in the Chilean capital.
The United Nations official indicated that the need to reach a global agreement, based on a true technological revolution and capable of converging with the post…
Ministers, deputy ministers and other senior authorities from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Uruguay-among other countries-will participate on June 9-10, 2014, in the First Meeting of the Conference on Science, Innovation and Information and Communications Technologies of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
The meeting, which will also be attended by international officials and representatives of cooperation agencies, is organized by ECLAC and Chile's Foreign Relations Ministry, with the support of the German Agency For…
This report updates the analysis set out in the Preliminary Overview of Latin America and the Caribbean 2013,
released in December 2013, on the basis of official data published by the countries in the region in the subsequent
months, and presents a revised economic outlook for 2014. In addition, it examines the external factors influencing
the region’s performance and their impact on the different components of the balance of payments and summarizes
the challenges and main trends in relation to monetary, exchange-rate and fiscal policy. It confirms the deceleration
of growth analysed in the Pr…
The 2013 edition of Social Panorama of Latin America presents ECLAC official measurements for the analysis of income poverty and seeks fresh approaches to poverty and well-being, placing special emphasis on multidimensional approaches. These approaches are exploratory and therefore not comprehensive. They have nevertheless been tackled in this year’s edition of Social Panorama because one thing is certain: the need is emerging in social policy design, in the evaluation of social development and in new demands of society for a more nuanced analysis of social progress and lags to underpin more i…
United States Trade Developments 2013-2014, is an annual report prepared by the ECLAC Washington Office. It provides an overview of the most relevant trade developments in the United States trade relations with Latin America and the Caribbean and the measures that inhibit the free flow of goods among countries in the Western Hemisphere.
The report presents trade figures and trends over the last few years to illustrate the nature of the U.S. engagement through trade with the world and with the Latin America and Caribbean region. Special emphasis was given to trade among the U.S., Canada, and Me…
The Damage and Loss Assessment (DaLA) methodology is helping to estimate the impacts of rain-related disasters that affected several communities along the eastern coast of the Trinidad over the past week.
Developed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN ECLAC), the DaLA methodology is being used as a guide by the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM) of Trinidad and Tobago to assess the economic consequences of the recent disasters at the community and household level.
Dr Steven Ramroop of the ODPM says that “the orga…
A team drawn from ECLAC’s subregional headquarters for the Caribbean and the regional headquarters in Santiago, Chile will be holding a training workshop to support the statistical offices of Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, and Barbados in the development of web-based applications for the dissemination of national census data.
Organised at the request of the respective governments, the workshop will take place from 29 September to 10 October 2014 in Saint George’s, Grenada, and follows a similar workshop held in Trinidad and Tobago in February 2014.
REDATAM is a software program developed by the…
The Ministry of Economic Development of Curaçao requested technical support from the ‘Financing for Development Division' of the Economic Commission for Latin American and Caribbean (ECLAC), through the agency of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), in order to design and define the process for the establishment of a new development finance organization.
From March 24th to 28th, 2014, Mr. Daniel Titelman, and Mr. Esteban Perez, Director and Economic Affairs Officer of the ECLAC's Financing for Development Division, undertook a fact finding mission to Curaçao to assist the government …
As part of its ongoing work in the Caribbean, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has responded to requests from member and associate member states for statistical capacity training in the core elements of Time Use Surveys.
On 10 – 11 December 2014, a Regional Seminar on Time Use Surveys will be held in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The seminar, which will target technical staff and practitioners from gender bureaus and national statistical offices, will be convened by ECLAC subregional headquarters for the Caribbean, with support from the ECLAC Divisio…
By means of an official statement sent to ECLAC on 21 February 2014, El Salvador joined the Declaration on the application of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean.…