Human development challenges emphasised in new Report

Jun 29, 2016 News

The Region of Latin America and the Caribbean requires a renewed focus on public policy to deal with current challenges, as well as to sustain, consolidate and continue with past achievements in terms of well-being.
This is outlined in the Executive Summary of the Regional Human Development Report for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Although the actual Report entitled ‘Multi-dimensional progress: well-being beyond income’ has not yet been officially released in English, snippets of its content have been unveiled in an Executive Summary shared by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The Report is essentially one that focuses on the increasingly pressing challenges facing the region.
The Report was launched on Tuesday, June 14, 2016, at the Latin American and Caribbean Parliament (Parlatino) in Panama, in the presence of national authorities, over 60 parliamentarians from the region and other key regional partners.
In line with the Sustainable Development Goals, the Report offers key policy recommendations to boost resilience and prevent millions from sliding back into poverty at a time when the Latin American and Caribbean region faces economic slowdown. The report therefore calls on Latin Americans to rethink the region’s progress along multi-dimensional lines, inspired by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
It also highlights the need for new metrics to measure development beyond per capita income, economic growth rates and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and recommends social protection, care systems, labour skills and closing historic gender, racial and ethnic gaps not resolved with economic growth alone.
In the Executive Summary, it is underscored that in times of global economic fragility, eradicating poverty and reducing inequalities in all their dimensions require a two-fold strategy. Moreover, the report stresses the need to protect the achievements of the last decade to prevent millions from falling back into poverty while promoting comprehensive policies adapted to populations suffering from discrimination and historical exclusions.
Among the main challenges outlined are reduced productive inclusion, the regressive nature of many tax systems, the substandard quality of education, the segmentation of social protection systems and the absence of care systems.
Low productive inclusion in quality jobs constitutes one of the challenges still to be addressed in the region and it is also an obstacle to achieving future transformations. The region is characterised by a high level of precarious, informal and low-productivities jobs. On the one hand, more than half of the 300 million people employed in the region work as salaried employees in micro-enterprises with fewer than five workers as unqualified self-employed workers, or as unpaid workers.
These conditions employ seven out of 10 working people who live in poverty and five out of 10 working people who are in a vulnerable situation, the Report highlights.
“The figures underline a high level of informality in the region’s enterprises: of the more than 50 million small and medium-sized enterprises in the region, some 37 million (70 per cent) are informal,” it outlined.
On the other hand, the Report takes into consideration that the economic growth experienced in the region as of 2003 was mainly due to factors concerning capital and labour.
“Therefore the contribution of these factors to total productivity was very low: just 4.5 per cent of the growth experiences in the 2003-2008 period was due to increases in productivity while during the years following the crisis of 2009, the contribution of productivity to growth was negative.”
As such it has been deduced in the Report that comprehensive policies that can act simultaneously on various fronts must be developed.
This is the third such report produced with financial support from the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development. Over 20 regional authorities took part in the report’s advisory board including ministers, senators and academics from the region.
UNDP is also finalising the Caribbean Report which will be launched next month.
Each human development report since 1990 has focused on some aspect of well-being ‘beyond income’. The human development approach is precisely about enlarging people’s choices – focusing on the richness of human lives rather than on material wealth or income alone.

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