Latin America’s Economies Need About a Billion Jabs in the Arm
The trajectory of any economic rebound for the region will be traced by the syringe.
One of the lucky ones.
Photographer: Claudio Reyes/AFP via Getty Images
The ruin that the novel coronavirus has visited on Latin America is hard to overstate. By almost any metric — 2.7 million companies shuttered in 2020, a 20% drop in investment, 44.1 million unemployed, 23.5 million projected to fall into poverty this year — the new report by the United Nations Economic Commission on Latin American and the Caribbean is a grim read.
After a year of unchecked infection and death, Latin America, with 8% of global population and 27% of the pandemic’s fatalities, is the developing world’s most indebted region. By the end of 2020, the region’s per capita income had collapsed to 2010 levels. “If Latin America flew through 2019 on a plane with one broken engine — income inequality, growing social unrest, political polarization, low productivity — the pandemic broke the other engine,” Eric Parrado, chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), told me.