By: Staff Writer
November 28, 2025
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in their Social Panorama of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), 2025 said that income concentration continues to be extreme in Latin America, since the wealthiest 10 percent obtains 34.2 percent of total income, while the poorest 10 percent only gets 1.7 percent – although this is just one of the dimensions in which inequality manifests itself in the region, given that it is a structural and multidimensional phenomenon, the United Nations regional organization emphasized.
The report also said: “. Over the past 10 years, income inequality in the region has been persistently higher than in countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
“According to ECLAC, the extreme inequality in the region is unacceptable from a rights and social justice perspective, as well as ineffective from an economic growth perspective.
“Inequality not only affects people’s opportunities and limits their access to well-being; it also weighs on society as a whole and on countries’ development. It erodes social cohesion and the stability of social compacts in various ways, for example by fuelling distrust in institutions and in public policies and officials, and weakens the attachment to democracy.
“It impedes members of the population from exercising their rights and exacerbates the other two structural traps affecting development in the region, as it is counterproductive for economic growth and weakens institutions and governance.
“Hence, the uncertain and complex environment marked by challenges linked to globalization and geopolitics, accelerated technological change, and the effects of climate change, migration and weaker global economic growth, which are worsening the challenges faced in the region, has given rise to a vicious circle of structural development traps that are perpetuating the crisis.”
osé Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, the regional organization’s Executive Secretary, said: “At ECLAC we have identified seven main factors that generate the trap of high inequality, low social mobility and weak social cohesion, five of which are analysed in this year’s Social Panorama.
“In line with this, we propose five strategies for escaping this trap: reduce educational inequality; create quality employment; make progress on gender equality and the care society; address the discrimination against and human rights violations affecting persons with disabilities, Indigenous Peoples and migrants; and continue strengthening the social institutional framework and its financing.
“Latin America and the Caribbean must redouble its efforts to break free of this trap and fulfil the commitments recently agreed upon at the Second World Summit for Social Development. ECLAC will continue supporting countries through its Regional Conference on Social Development in Latin America and the Caribbean.”