UNITED NATIONS, CMC – The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Monday called for social policies, which tackle the problem of inequality in the region after a new report said the populations in Latin America and the Caribbean 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 entitled “Acting On The Future: Breaking The Intergenerational Cycle Of Inequality.”

It said 10 of the 15 most unequal countries in the world were to be found in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The report also finds that it is possible to reduce inequality through the implementation of public policies that lift the region out of the inequality trap.

The 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, according to the report.

“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.

For UNDP “equality is instrumental in ensuring meaningful liberties; that is to say, in terms of helping all people to share in meaningful life options so that they can make autonomous choices,” Muñoz said.

The UNDP said that women, indigenous populations and those of African descent were the groups hardest hit by inequality.

It said women in the region were paid less than men for the same work, have a greater presence in the informal economy and face a double workload.

The UNDP said compared to women of European descent, twice as many members of indigenous and African descended populations, on average, live on one US dollar a day.

“Inequality is a source of social vulnerability. For that reason, as the report shows, it’s critical to advance knowledge of the factors explaining inequality in human development in Latin America and the Caribbean and its persistence from one generation to the next,” said Rebeca Grynspan, UNDP’s associate administrator.

“That would allow the proposal of a strong framework for development of targeted policies that drive a more equality-based development,” she added.

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.

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