Cuban News Agency

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The head of the UN agency made the statement on Monday noting that
inequality increased in the region in the two decades preceding the
outbreak of the international economic crisis, in 2008, reports Granma
newspaper.

“The crisis broke the continuity of the model that thought the market
could do it all” and has highlighted the need for “progressive” policies
against poverty, Barcena said in a lecture she delivered in the University
of Havana to academics and diplomats.

“We have the horror of being the most unequal region in the world. The
most egalitarian countries of Latin America, which are Cuba and Uruguay,
have a long way from everyone else,” she said, insisting that “the market
will never make people equal; the market creates inequalities by itself.”

Barcena said that in the region “the two factories of inequality are the
productive structure and education” and warned that many governments are
bound to short-term problems, and have not been provided with a “road map”
to overcome the barriers that slow structural development.

“There are resources (natural and financial) but there are no policies to
boost growth,” she said.

ECLAC forecasts that in 2012 the average economic growth in the region
will reach 3.7%, after reaching 4.3% in 2011.

Among the barriers to development, the official said the low rates of
investment, productivity and taxation, among others.

“Latin America has a very low taxation, 18.6% of GDP. In the countries of
the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) are
33-35%,” she said.
 
She also criticized that the region has a “regressive tax structure, which
taxes consumption rather than income or wealth.”

She also noted that since 2002, “Venezuela is the country that has had
more success” in reducing poverty in the region, but progress was made in
Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina and El Salvador.

The secretary of ECLAC regretted that 177 million Latin Americans live in
poverty, 73 million of them in abject poverty.