The European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, Federica Mogherini, reaffirmed today in Mexico the cooperation ties between Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean, and called for building a strategic association between both parties based on a new governance model with equality and growth.
The European official participated as a special guest in ECLAC’s thirty-sixth session, which is being held in Mexico City, and spoke before an audience made up of authorities and representatives of member nations of this Unit…
Official statistics and key indicators are essential for observing countries’ economic and social progress, determining the structural drivers of their growth and shaping priorities. Using the methodology of Khramov and Lee (2013), key indicators from the System of National Accounts (SNA), as well as balance of payments, monetary and financial, and public finance statistics, it is proposed to use a composite indicator to assess Latin America’s economic performance. An examination of long-term trends finds that this index generally captures the major economic shocks and periods of robust perfor…
At the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), authorities and experts discussed the options for implementing active fiscal policies and countercyclical arrangements in the region to protect public investment, social progress and boost growth – particularly at a time of global uncertainty and a slowdown of growth and trade.
Finance Ministers, fiscal policymakers, officials from international agencies and academics from several countries are attending the XXVIII Regional Seminar on Fiscal Policy, which has been organized in Santiago, Chile, by ECLAC with the support of …
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) will hold its most important biennial meeting in Mexico City from May 23 to May 27, 2016, where officials will present to its 45 member and 13 associate countries a report on recent activities and will offer governments a reflection upon development strategies in the context of the commitments contained in the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Mexico’s Foreign Minister, Claudia Ruiz Massieu, and ECLAC’s Executive Secretary, Alicia Bárcena, signed the agreement on 12 February through which Mexico becomes the ve…
The structural gaps that persist in the region have hampered dynamic and sustained economic growth and greater social development in Latin America and the Caribbean, Alicia Bárcena, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), said during a keynote lecture in Mexico City on Thursday, 12 November.
The senior United Nations official gave a lecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) entitled “Circumstances and Structures. Decolonizing the development agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean.” In it, she presented the foundations …
This document was prepared by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) for the official visit of Geung-hye Park, President of the Republic of Korea, to several countries in the region.
The Republic of Korea’s success in economic and social development offers many lessons for Latin America and the Caribbean and the developing world as a whole. From being one of the poorest countries in the world in the early 1960s, in six short decades the Republic of Korea has succeeded in transforming itself into a high-income economy, a major manufacturing, scientific and export po…
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…
This annual publication, one of the most important of ECLAC, includes official country figures up to November 30th, and an analysis of developments in the region's economy in 2005 and projections for 2006. The Latin American and Caribbean economy grew by 4.3% in 2005, which represents the third consecutive year of growth in the region. Per capita GDP is estimated to have risen by about 3%. Unemployment rate fell from 10.3% in 2004 to 9.3% in 2005 and poverty indices decreased from 44% in 2002 to 40.6% in 2005. The performance of the domestic demand and the expansion of 3.3% of the world …
The Cuban financial landscape is marked by unstable, undiversified and largely unsustainable access to sources of development financing. Given the existence of a reduced and narrow range of sources of financing (family remittances, foreign direct investment, bilateral loans, official development assistance), the country depends on current flows – especially exports – to finance production, public services, infrastructure and development. This is an especially adverse context, even though Cuba is a middle-income country.
In recent years, the toughening of the U.S. blockade, the effects of the i…
Convened by ECLAC Caribbean, and hosted by the Government of Suriname, the CDR was officially opened by the outgoing Chair, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Keisal Peters. The meeting was held at the Royal Torarica Hotel, in Paramaribo, Suriname.
The Roundtable, Minister Peters said, was conceived as a forum to discuss critical issues that pose fundamental challenge to development in the Caribbean, and to explore solutions that will ultimately support inclusive growth and better living standards for our people, while protecting our environment. Reflecting …
Experts from international and multilateral organizations, along with government officials from various Latin American and Caribbean countries, participated in a high-level seminar on the new challenges of international cooperation and their importance for furthering the region’s development in a complex context such as the current one.
The event, entitled New challenges and new perspectives on international cooperation: Development approaches from Latin America and the Caribbean, took place on September 13-14 at the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (…
The document Guidelines for Productive Transformation in Santiago del Estero (in Spanish only), presented recently by the office of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is the product of joint work by national authorities and officials from Santiago del Estero province and was developed in collaboration with ECLAC in the framework of the project “Productive development and spatial heterogeneity in Latin America: Institutions and Capacity Development in the Planning and Implementation of Regional Production Policies,” which is supported…
The aim of this paper is to quantify the productive diversity of the manufacturing industry in the provinces of Argentina, to analyse trends in productive diversity between 1996 and 2012, and to identify the main related economic factors. A diversity index is calculated based on official data on total registered wage employment from the Dynamic Employment Analysis Database (BADE). An analysis is then performed of trends in diversity in the different provinces over the period. Lastly, an econometric panel data model is estimated to identify the main related economic factors. The industrial dive…
The Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, presented the El Salvador-Guatemala-Honduras-Mexico Comprehensive Development Plan to President Juan Orlando Hernández and the Government of Honduras and participated in the inauguration of the National Commission on the 2030 Agenda for the Sustainable Development Goals (NC-SDG) and the Technical Committee for Sustainable Development, in the context of an official visit to Tegucigalpa on July 24-25.
“The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Central America-Mexico Compre…
The role of the private sector is key to the challenge of mobilizing financing sources and mechanisms for implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in the region, business representatives, delegates and international officials agreed during the Business Forum for the Sustainable Development Goals in Latin America and the Caribbean 2019: Public-Private Strategies for the Financing and Monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals, held on Monday, April 22, in Chile.
The event, organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Uni…
Although, at first glance, it would seem to be a contradiction in terms, official statistics indicate that both unemployment and economic activity in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela are on a steep downward trend. However, a decline in unemployment can, in fact, occur in the midst of an economic recession if a portion of the actual unemployment rate is concealed by employment in the informal sector and/or by a significant number of people abandoning their job search. Using maximum likelihood estimates for homogeneous Markov matrices applied to household sample survey data for the period st…
External restrictions, financial integration and income distribution were some of the topics addressed during the second seminar-workshop on productive structure, institutions and economic dynamics held on August 20-21 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in which government officials and experts participated.
The event began with a regional assessment made by Martín Abeles, Director of the Buenos Aires Office of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and Sebastián Valdecantos, an expert from the same institution. Following that, a series of academic studies related to the…
Latin American government authorities, international officials and fiscal policy experts will participate on March 10-11 in the XXVII Regional Seminar on Fiscal Policy, which will be held at the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile.
The event is organized by ECLAC (through its Economic Development Division) with the support of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It is also backed by the Spanish Agen…
The World Summit for Social Development, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, from 6 to 12 March 1995, brought together a large number of heads of State and Government and official representatives from States Members of the United Nations and culminated in the adoption of the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development and the Programme of Action of the World Summit for Social Development. These two documents —the first containing policy statements, the other dealing with their practical application— imply commitments at the national, regional and international levels.
Barely two years have passed si…
Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health in Antigua and Barbuda, Mr. Walter Christopher, emphasized the value and potential of the techniques imparted to bolster the efficiency of the budgeting exercise. He was attending the high level briefing seminar following a week-long training workshop hosted by the ECLAC subregional headquarters for the Caribbean.
The objective of the workshop was to build the capacity of public officials to conduct Public Expenditure Reviews (PERs) with appropriate applications for their respective sectors. The initiative complemented the recently launched ECLAC d…