UNDP report says Latin America, Caribbean have most inequality

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Monday called for social policies, which tackle the problem of inequality in the Latin American and Caribbean region.

A new report says the populations in this region have the world’s highest levels of differences in wealth and income.

“This inequality is persistent, self-perpetuating in areas where social mobility is low and it poses an obstacle to progress in human development,” the UNDP said in its first development report for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The report, entitled “Acting On The Future: Breaking The Intergenerational Cycle Of Inequality”, states that 10 of the 15 most unequal countries in the world are to be found in Latin America and the Caribbean.

And it says it is possible to reduce inequality through the implementation of public policies that lift the region out of the "inequality trap".

The UNDP report says the government policies must have an impact on people, address the set of constraints that perpetuate poverty and inequality, and empower people to feel they are in charge of their development destinies.

“This report reaffirms the critical importance of the fight against poverty, while indicating that it is necessary to go further,” said UNDP Regional Director Heraldo Muñoz.

“Inequality is inherently an impediment to progress in the area of human development, and efforts to reduce inequality must be explicitly mainstreamed in the public agenda,” he added.

The UNDP says women, indigenous populations and people of African descent are the groups hardest hit by inequality. It notes that women in the region are paid less than men for the same work, have a greater presence in the informal economy and face a double workload.

According to the report, the most common public policies in the region have focused on specific aspects of combating poverty without considering the deep-seated nature of deprivation and its systemic relationship to inequality.