Credit: WFP/Arete/Siegfried Modola

By Olivier De Schutter and Luis Felipe López-Calva
WASHINGTON DC, Mar 8 2024 (IPS)

Poverty is multidimensional. If we think of classical thinkers, Adam Smith referred to the basis of self-respect and the importance of being able to “appear in public without shame,” while John Rawls wrote about “primary goods,” which included rights and liberties as well as income and wealth.

Amartya Sen, advancing in formalization, brought the notion of “functionings” as the “beings and doings” effectively available to people in their capability set, so they can “pursue the life plans they have reasons to value.”

It is mainstream today to argue that poverty is multidimensional, moving beyond just access to goods and services. But exploring which dimensions are “appropriate” in each context has been a fundamental pursuit of development analysts and practitioners in recent decades.

It has been almost 30 years since Sabina Alkire devoted her work to the understanding, classification, and measurement of the many dimensions of poverty, particularly those that are “hidden” in our concepts and indicators.

Indeed, there are some dimensions associated with experiencing the condition of poverty that cannot be so easily observed and have not been properly measured yet are very important when it comes to policy effectiveness.

Those dimensions include aspects related to emotions that trigger behavioural responses: feelings of isolation, discrimination, effects on the sense of dignity and self-respect, and disempowerment. We have come a long way in our thinking about poverty, but our actions to tackle it and to understand the complex interactions between dimensions remains underdeveloped.

At the World Bank, the project on “Voices of the Poor,” started almost 30 years ago, strove to think differently about poverty. It drew on the views of 60,000 people living in poverty across 60 countries to better understand the challenges they faced, helping expand our understanding of poverty to include not only income and consumption but also lack of access to education and health, powerlessness, voicelessness, vulnerability, and fear.

Later, in 2012, the Social Observatory project used a broader view of poverty dimensions to make anti-poverty projects more adaptive—and ultimately more effective. Since 2018, the World Bank’s multidimensional poverty measure has gone beyond monetary deprivation to include other dimensions such as access to education, health, nutritional, and basic infrastructure services.

And in 2023, the World Bank began publishing the multidimensional poverty index—an effort by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Programme—which is especially pertinent for low-income countries.

More recently, researchers from the University of Oxford and the global anti-poverty movement ATD Fourth World uncovered a set of “hidden dimensions of poverty” through a three-year participatory research project in six countries (Bangladesh, Bolivia, France, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States) that sought to further refine our understanding of poverty.

The teams identified nine dimensions of poverty that were common across all countries, despite the vastly different circumstances in each, using the “merging of knowledge” methodology. This approach brings together people in poverty (with their knowledge of the reality of poverty), academics (with their scientific knowledge), and practitioners (with their action-based knowledge).

The identified dimensions included a lack of decent work or income, of course, but also feelings of powerlessness, lacking control, and experiencing “povertyism” (negative attitudes and behaviours toward people living in poverty).

These lesser-recognized and lesser-visible dimensions of poverty are no less important for policies designed to combat poverty than a person’s income or access to employment. Escaping poverty will be far more difficult if you don’t also address the discrimination people in poverty face, the shame they experience, or the “aspirations gap” that results from being raised in a low-income household.

But until now, policy makers have lacked the practical tools they need to properly capture and combat these hidden, and thus largely ignored, dimensions of poverty.

The Inclusive and Deliberative Elaboration and Evaluation of Policies (IDEEP) tool, which was presented at the ATD Fourth World, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank conference on Addressing the Hidden Dimensions of Poverty in Knowledge and Policies, is the first of its kind to help policy makers transform the findings of this research into action.

Created in partnership between the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and ATD Fourth World, the IDEEP tool supports policy makers in designing, implementing, and evaluating anti-poverty policies in direct partnership with people in poverty, ensuring all its dimensions, including those that are “hidden,” are taken into account.

This is crucial, given that policies that do not account for the views and lived experiences of people in poverty tend to be riddled with blind spots, particularly around these hidden dimensions.

The IDEEP tool identified social isolation among disadvantaged communities as an unintended result of a housing project in Mauritius, for example, and institutional maltreatment resulting in fewer people accessing social protection benefits in France.

The right to participation is a human right. Only by upholding it will we achieve better informed, more effective, and more imaginative policy making. Yet the record of participatory processes in anti-poverty policy making is mixed, with policy makers often simply “informing” or “consulting” people in poverty, rather than recognizing them as the real experts about the obstacles they face.

To combat this, we need to go one step further in our efforts to fulfil the right to participation by introducing the idea of “deliberation,” which is defined in the IDEEP tool as bringing together different groups, including people in poverty, who meet, present arguments based on their unique insights, weigh them up, and propose actionable solutions.

The IDEEP tool offers a new, deliberative approach to anti-poverty policy making, one that recognizes the power imbalances inherent in traditional participatory processes and brings together different groups as equals to debate potential solutions before arriving at a consensus. This is a true merging of knowledge.

This approach is especially urgent as we rapidly head towards 2030, the target year for achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the goal of eradicating extreme poverty for all people everywhere (SDG1). If we continue on a path of business as usual, we will not achieve this ambitious goal.

We need to widen our perspective and rethink how we can jumpstart a process of inclusive and sustainable growth for all; this includes engaging with those with lived experiences in poverty in the search for meaningful, holistic policy solutions. Without embracing this, efforts to combat poverty—and its hidden dimensions—will fall flat.

Olivier De Schutter is UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Human Rights Council; Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva is Global Director, Poverty and Equity Global Practice.

Source: World Bank

IPS UN Bureau

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A woman in the Dominican Republic receives food from a government soup kitchen set up to help fight hunger triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, UN agencies warn against rising hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Credit: WFP/Karolyn Ureña

By Luis Felipe López-Calva
NEW YORK, Jun 24 2021 (IPS)

The first wave of COVID-19 never ended in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Since the region became a hotspot for the pandemic in June 2020, successive waves have continued to build upon the first.

Despite being home to just 8% of the world’s population, the region has suffered 20% of total confirmed COVID-19 cases and 32% of total confirmed COVID-19 deaths. The relentless spread of the virus has brought with it not only the tragic loss of so many lives, but also devastating economic and social damages.

Poverty and hunger are once again on the rise in the region and growth prospects are bleak. With limited access to vaccines in many countries, hopes for a return to “normal” remain distant.

Luis Felipe López-Calva

Unfortunately, in LAC it was not only the response to the pandemic that mattered – but fundamentally, the “pre-existing conditions” that characterized the region prior to the pandemic’s arrival.

These pre-existing conditions, or structural weaknesses, made countries in the region more vulnerable to the multiple and interconnected crises associated with COVID-19.

UNDP’s recently launched Regional Human Development Report, “Trapped: High Inequality and Low Growth in Latin America and the Caribbean”, looks at two of these conditions: high-inequality and low-productivity.

It explores how underlying factors related to ineffective governance work to propel these outcomes in a mutually reinforcing vicious cycle (a “trap”). In particular, it highlights how the concentration of power in the hands of “the few” works to distort public policies in ways that both perpetuate existing patterns of inequality and hold back productivity growth in the region.

Exiting this trap will only happen if countries take bold action to embrace systemic solutions that consider the complexity of the dynamics between governance, inequality, and productivity. For years, countries in the region have invested in various solutions to address these challenges.

Community kitchen serves hot lunches for Peruvians. Credit: WFP/Guillermo Galdos

However, many of these responses were short-term, designed to separately address different symptoms of a much deeper problem. This has left countries with a large set of fragmented and costly policies that segment the labor market, provide erratic risk protection to households, do not redistribute income sufficiently towards lower-income groups, and bias the allocation of resources in ways that punish productivity and stable growth.

The region cannot afford to stay stuck on this path.

While the pandemic has accelerated the urgency of this challenge, citizens were already demanding change before we knew what COVID-19 was. As citizens poured onto the streets of LAC in late 2019, it became eminently clear that “business as usual” was not working for “the many.”

LAC countries made important development progress over the past thirty years, but the events of more recent years have revealed just how fragile that progress was. We celebrated a temporary reduction of inequality in the 1990s and early 2000s, but it was both insufficient and unsustainable—largely propelled by a commodity boom, targeted cash transfers, and a compression of the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers.

While many countries achieved middle-income status, they have been unable to consolidate themselves as middle-class societies. Millions have been left behind as opportunities have fallen short of people’s aspirations for their own lives and their expectations of their governments.

What we have learned is that there is no single “silver bullet” policy that can change this. The region already has many “good” policies in place. The challenge we face now is a structural one.

It requires rethinking the foundations of our systems from a longer-term perspective and considering the interconnected ways in which these issues work to reinforce one another in positive or negative directions.

While there are many potential entry points, the potential for universal social protection systems that ensure that everybody is protected, that income is redistributed towards those in need, that the policies deployed to achieve these aims provide incentives to firms and workers to increase productivity, and that the sources of revenue are sustainable, is particularly important.

This requires a principle of universality understood in three complementary dimensions: (i) All the population exposed to a given risk needs to be covered through the same program; (ii) The source of financing should be the same for each program, based on the type of risk covered; and (iii) When programs provide in kind benefits, quality should be the same for all.

A social protection system built around these universal principles offers the region a route to increasing spending in social protection while strengthening the foundations of long-term growth, and a path to enhance social inclusion.

Moving in this direction could represent “a third moment” in the history of social protection in the region. The first moment occurred over 75 years ago, when countries began the construction of their social protection systems; and the second moment occurred in the early 1990s, as countries emerged from the “lost-decade” of the 1980s.

It is possible that the current moment of crisis associated with COVID-19 may open the required political space for this third moment to take place, as countries contemplate substantial changes to their social protection and taxation systems in their efforts to contain social damage, restore fiscal balances, and resume growth.

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Excerpt:

Credit: UNDP

By Luis Felipe López-Calva
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 2020 (IPS)

History shows that in Latin America and the Caribbean, volatility is the norm and not the exception and that the development trajectories of their countries are not linear.

The region has significant links to China, economic relations have skyrocketed in recent decades, particularly through trade, foreign direct investment, and loans.

The COVID-19 outbreak is a new potential source of volatility and a threat to the macroeconomic stability of Latin America and the Caribbean.

While it is still too early to fully understand its impact on China’s growth, and how it will result in a slowdown in our region, what we know so far is that COVID-19 is spreading at an accelerated rate and has caused a disruption to China’s economy.

The virus has spread to more than 117 countries, with more than 117,335 confirmed cases. It is very likely that the impact on China’s growth and commodity prices, besides, represents a shock to our region.

Latin America and the Caribbean have significant links to China, economic relations have skyrocketed in recent decades, particularly through trade, foreign direct investment, and loans.

Trade with China increased from US$12 billion in 2000 to US$306 billion in 2018 and is already the second trading partner. Three years ago, it represented nine percent of total Latin American exports and 18.4 percent of total imports.

It is not the same in all countries, but, for example, China represents 28.1 percent of total Brazilian exports, as well as 10.5 percent of Argentina’s and 32.4 percent of Chile’s.

Although China mainly imports primary products such as minerals and metals, agricultural products and fuels, its exports consist of machines and electrical equipment, textiles, chemicals, and metals.

Its six main trading partners in the region are Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela, whose exports are concentrated in four products, which represent 75 percent of Latin American exports: copper, soy, crude oil, and iron ore.

Foreign direct investment and loans from China have increased over the past decade. Between 2005 and 2017, China represented five percent of total foreign direct investment–more than US$ 90 billion dollars.

According to the Inter-American Dialogue Public Policy Center, China has placed more than US$141 billion in loans since 2005, which represents more than the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Development Bank of Latin America combined.

Venezuela is, by far, the largest recipient of these loans, with an amount of US$67.2 billion dollars since 2005, followed by Brazil at US$28.9 billion), Ecuador at US$18.4 billion and Argentina at US$16.9 billion.

Although the full extent of the impact of the coronavirus will ultimately depend on how well the outbreak is contained, China’s growth in the first quarter of the year is expected to fall sharply and recover later in the year.

While China has estimated its 2020 growth at six percent several analysts have revised their projections downward to between five and even 4.5 percent.

These shocks will likely be translated into Latin America and the Caribbean through trade, commodity prices and foreign direct investment. In terms of trade, a slowdown in Chinese demand for goods driven by an economic slowdown will have a strong impact in countries such as Brazil, Chile, and Peru.

Net exporters Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador will also feel the impact to a lesser extent. History shows that in Latin America and the Caribbean, volatility is the norm and not the exception, and that the development trajectories of their countries are not linear.

The volatility arose with this new coronavirus testing resilience here and in China, that ability to return to a predetermined path of development in the shortest possible time.

Beyond the panic that has been unleashed, COVID-19 is a call to resilience in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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The Providencia Solar company inaugurated in 2017 is the first photovoltaic power plant in El Salvador, in the central department of La Paz. With 320,000 solar panels, it is one of the largest solar installations in Central America, whose countries are making efforts to transition their energy mixes to renewable sources. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Luis Felipe López-Calva
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 31 2019 (IPS)

The UN Climate Action Summit 2019, which took place in the days leading up to the 74th UN General Assembly, delivered new pathways and practical actions for governments and private sector to intensify climate action.

Among these, it recognized that the path towards protecting our planet requires a fundamental change in terms of how households, and the society as a whole, produce and consume electricity.

Despite important efforts, we are still not moving slowly in terms of investments in clean energy. According to the International Energy Agency, in 2018 alone global energy-related CO2 emissions rose 1.7 percent to a historic high, driven by higher energy demand.

This #GraphForThought looks at how Latin America and the Caribbean generates and consumes energy, and outlines some elements of the way forward for LAC energy markets.

It highlights that while LAC is a region whose contribution to global carbon emission from energy generation has been relatively low (contributing to less than 8% of total emissions worldwide), it has contributed significantly to the solution by moving firmly into more renewable sources of energy.

Luis Felipe López-Calva

Additionally, electricity cannot yet be stored at a large scale: it is either used or lost. The process of electricity generation produces a series of effects that inevitably have an impact on people and the environment, albeit some more than others.

That is, social and environmental impacts differ if electricity is generated by burning coal, inundating a valley, or building a wind farm, with effects varying from greenhouse gas emissions, displacement of local populations, and disturbances to local ecosystems (i.e. wind farms threaten flying wildlife).

The goal in energy planning is to balance benefits and costs, aiming ideally to find mechanism that internalize the environmental impact (either through markets or through regulation, both of which require effective governance: clear, stable and credibly enforced rules).

So, how does LAC fare in terms of its energy use? According to a widely used index, the “energy intensity indicator”, LAC is the most efficient region in the world when it comes to energy use.

This index captures the amount of energy needed to generate one dollar of product or service. LAC is also becoming more efficient over time, with the index falling in past years, suggesting that the region is doing relatively more with less energy.

To a large extent due to the presence of large hydroelectric power generators, 52% of LAC’s energy came from renewable sources (by 2013). This is almost three times higher than the global average of 22% and has been increasing steadily over the past two decades

This involves clearly many challenges ahead. Among the most pressing is related precisely to the impact of climate change on renewable energy generation: hydropower may be a highly efficient renewable energy system, but it is becoming less reliable due to changing weather patterns.

This has been exacerbated by the effect of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena, which strongly influence rain levels in the region. In parts of South America, these lead to reduced rains and to droughts that hinder the capacity to generate electricity from hydro sources, resulting in a need to increase the generation of electricity based on fossil fuels to be able to meet growing demands.

In other parts of the region, namely the deepest southern end of the continent, these phenomena produce extreme increases in rain, resulting in an unprecedented increase of water levels that affect families and lead to high vulnerability for the populations.

It is also crucial to understand the distributional impacts of continuing the transition towards renewable sources of energy in LAC. Energy transitions will have unequal distribution of their costs and benefits, particularly for communities that depend on traditional energy infrastructure for their livelihoods.

Rising fuel prices can also trigger protests, as we have seen in various countries in the region including Brazil, Mexico, and most recently Ecuador (although, in this case, the rise in price was not explicitly due to a transition to renewable sources but its was clearly related to “pricing the carbon right”, by the phasing out of fuel subsidies).

Inclusiveness and affordability, as well as a comprehensive understanding of winners, losers, and potential instruments for compensation and mitigation, will be critical components for a sustainable transition.

So, what is the future of energy in LAC? While hydropower will continue to be the largest energy source in the region for a while, exploiting its complementarities with other renewable energy sources will be key to ensure sustainability.

This change is facilitated by the fact that technological advances have allowed for a reduction in cost and improvement in efficiency of using these renewable sources (solar and wind, for example). Countries addressing diversification efforts are working to create the enabling policy and regulatory environments for other renewable sources –such as wind and solar– to flourish.

For example, recent auctions in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Peru have helped to accelerate the deployment of thousands of megawatts of wind and solar energy in the region. Opportunities for investments are vast.

Promoting the use of clean energy in efficient ways is a critical objective in our fight against climate change. LAC has been at the forefront in the use of renewable sources, being a relatively low carbon emitter.

However, there are challenges ahead, with the regional demand for energy expected to keep growing as countries develop and poverty levels fall. Investments and changes in the policy environment will be needed to continue to transition towards sustainable renewable sources of energy.

As Nick Stern has stated recently: if we get it right, clean energy –and climate action in general– is the inclusive growth story of the twenty first century.

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By Luis Felipe López-Calva
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 26 2019 (IPS)

Gender inequality is about power asymmetries. In the late 1970s, Robert Putnam reflected on the status of women in policy decisions in his comparative study on political elites. Quoting Elizabeth Vallance, he concluded that, “where power is, women aren’t.”.

The challenge for achieving gender equity by rebalancing power has to be addressed in different spheres: the household, the market, and society at large.

Luis Felipe López-Calva

Fortunately, over the past several decades the face of politics has changed in many Latin American and Caribbean countries. Not only have women been elected to the highest office many times in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1990—but women representation is also expanding across multiple policy arenas from the national to the local level.

As shown in Graph 1, from (circa) 1997 to (circa) 2019 the share of women in important policy arenas, such as parliament, ministerial cabinet, and the supreme court, has nearly tripled.

However, as the graph shows—despite progress on average in LAC (the solid line) we are still well below parity level (the dotted horizontal line) and heterogeneity across countries within LAC remain substantial (by the individual country dots).

Moreover, it is important to note that while women’s representation overall has been increasing, minority women such as Afro-descendants and indigenous women remain systematically excluded from the policy arena.

Graph 2 shows that only fifteen countries in LAC achieved “gender parity” at some point in time in at least one policy arena in the past two decades. For example, two countries in LAC (Nicaragua and Grenada) have had gender parity in the Ministerial Cabinet; two countries (Suriname and Cuba) have had gender parity in the National Parliament; while only Dominica has had gender parity in terms of Local Mayors over the past two decades.

Why does it matter to have women in political leadership? Support of women’s leadership has a normative value in itself and should be a guiding principle in our societies. However, it also has instrumental value by helping to make the system more responsive to women’s demands and aspirations.

Evidence suggests that enhancing women’s representation in the policy arena can help to bring a gender-lens to policy—for example in issue areas such as travel mobility, starting a job, equal pay, marriage and divorce, parental leave, running a business, asset management and inheritance, and pensions.

For example, research on Brazil finds that women’s representation in municipal government leads to the adoption of more “women-friendly” policies in areas such as domestic violence and childcare.

Given the importance of women’s representation in the policy arena both intrinsically and instrumentally—what can be done to accelerate its progress?

Gender quotas (laws stipulating a required share or number of women in political positions) are an increasingly common solution, and perhaps one of the main drivers of why political representation has increased.

However, even where quotas exist, informal norms may clash with formal legal structures—leading to situations in which quotas remain unimplemented or strategically circumvented.

For example, in our region, we saw this in the case of the “Juanitas” and, more recently, the “Manuelitas” in Mexico, where women ran for office on the ballot in compliance with gender quotas—only to later renounce their position and cede it to a man. Cases such as this reveal the deeply entrenched discriminatory norms and beliefs still held by so many about women’s ability to lead.

Moreover, according to the World Values Survey, on average in Latin America, 23% of people still believe that “men make better politicians than women” reflective of the region’s historical machista culture.

While women continue to face both formal and informal barriers to entering the policy arena in Latin America and the Caribbean—the region represents a positive example of change in many ways.

Not only has the share of women in politics increased, but it has coincided with the improvement of more gender-equitable development outcomes (such as women’s attainment of higher education) as well as more gender-equitable rules of the game (such as gender quota laws).

These achievements have in turn respectively helped to redistribute greater de facto and de jure power to women, which further strengthens their voice in the policy arena and subsequently their ability to make the system more responsive to women’s demands and aspirations.

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By Luis Felipe López-Calva
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 9 2019 (IPS)

Transparency is a critical element of making governance more effective. By making information available, it creates a foundation for greater accountability to citizens.

In recent decades, transparency has been on the rise across Latin America and the Caribbean. According to data from the Global Right to Information Rating, 23 countries in LAC have laws securing citizens’ right to information.

Colombia was the first country in the region to pass such a law in 1985, and Saint Kitts and Nevis was the most recent country to do so in 2018.

While transparency is a necessary condition for promoting accountability, it is not a sufficient condition. We can think about transparency as a first step.

While transparency makes information available, we also need publicity to make information accessible, and accountability mechanisms to make information actionable.

Information, per se, is nothing without publicity and accountability. If information does not reach the interested audiences, its effect is negligible. Similarly, even if information reaches the public, if it does not lead to consequences, its effect is not only negligible but potentially harmful.

For example, we have seen, unfortunately, many cases in our region where people can access detailed information about corruption cases, but nothing happens to those who are responsible. This leads to frustration and destroys trust.

Luis Felipe López-Calva

In many cases these pseudo-facts are created for political purposes and target specific audiences, with the intention to induce certain outcomes (for example, by influencing voting behavior).

This system has been called the “fake news” industry—a term widely used by politicians in recent times. It’s important to note that false information can also be spread unintentionally (what is known as “misinformation”).

The rise of disinformation and misinformation has been facilitated by the rise of technology. Technology—particularly the rise of social media and messaging apps—has reduced the cost of disseminating information to massive audiences.

This has made the “publicity” industry more competitive and created a new social dynamic in which people often take access to information as equivalent to knowledge.

While knowledge is difficult to build and constantly update, information has become easy to get, and public debates are increasingly based on false—and often deliberately false—information.

Indeed, a recent study by scholars at MIT found that false news spreads much more rapidly than true news—and this effect is particularly salient for false political news (in comparison to false news about topics such as terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information).

According the 2018 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, citizens in LAC countries are facing high exposure to false information, and are very concerned about what news is real and what news is fake on the internet.

In each of the four LAC countries included in the study (Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina), over 35% of respondents stated that they were exposed to completely made-up news in the last week—reaching as high as 43% of the sample in Mexico.

Moreover, over 60% of respondents stated that they are very or extremely concerned about what is real and what is fake on the internet when it comes to news—reaching as high as 85% of the sample in Brazil.

This high level of concern is consistent with recent experiences with political disinformation in the region—for example, the use of automated bots to influence public opinion in Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela.

This problem carries with it the concern for broader potential consequences such as deepening political polarization or the erosion of trust in the media. Indeed, over the past few decades years, the dissemination of false information by political parties and levels of political polarization are increasing in tandem in LAC.

This is a challenge not only in LAC, but in many regions around the world. This global preoccupation was reflected in the theme chosen for this year’s World Press Freedom Day—which focused on journalism and elections in times of disinformation.

Several of the countries in Latin America are holding presidential elections later this year: Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Uruguay. There is a concern in the region about how disinformation campaigns, coupled with microtargeting of political messages and sophisticated online advertising through social networks and online platforms, could affect the outcome of elections.

There is a lot we can do in this area to protect the information value chain and the quality of elections—such as “clean campaign” agreements between political parties, the creation of independent fact-checking services, greater enforcement by social media companies, and the promotion of information literacy among citizens.

In Latin America, these initiatives are still nascent, but they are growing. It is important to recognize, however, that combatting the challenge of disinformation campaigns will require the coordinated action of multiple stakeholders such as electoral courts, the media, civil society, academia and tech businesses (such as Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, and Twitter).

Without a strong coalition of actors, it will be difficult to successfully repair the information value chain and achieve accountability.

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By Luis Felipe López-Calva
UNITED NATIONS, May 15 2019 (IPS)

Development is a very uneven process, accompanied by heterogeneity in outcomes across sectors, across regions and across income groups. Such process, Albert Hirschman elegantly established about 60 years ago, constantly generates tensions and demands for redistribution of resources and power. In this sense, conflict is inherent to development.

Long term outcomes in terms of prosperity, equity and peace will always depend on the way in which such tensions are processed. Indeed, it depends on the way in which actors interact to solve these tensions; it depends on effective governance.

If tensions are solved by excluding some groups systematically, inequity and violence are more likely to characterize societies. Indeed, we see in Latin America and the Caribbean that violence has become a mechanism to adapt to these tensions and to process conflict.

The Regional Human Development Report 2013-2014 “Citizen Security with a Human Face” showed the ways in which crime and insecurity undermine development in Latin America and the Caribbean. Crime erodes the well-being of citizens and deters economic growth (Enamorado et al, 2013).

Despite recent progress in citizen security and marginal reductions in violence, LAC remains the most violent region in the world. Indeed, a recently released report by Igarape Institute states that while Latin America is home to 8 percent of the world’s population, 33 percent of all homicides take place there.

Moreover, 17 of the 20 countries with them most homicides in the world are in LAC. While, WHO classifies 10 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants as an epidemic, the average in LAC was 24 in 2016, marginally reduced to 21.6 in 2018.*

We see in the figure below that homicide rates in the region, in particular for some countries in Central America and the Caribbean, are much higher than those of countries with similar levels of GDP per capita.

For example, Honduras and Congo have similar GDP per capital rates, however Honduras suffers 56.5 homicides per 100,000 people, while Congo suffers 9.3. Similarly, while Mexico has close to 20 homicides, Montenegro, with a similar GDP per capital, only has 4.5.

The homicide rate in Colombia is over to 25, while in Lebanon it is 4. What explains these high rates of violent crime in LAC?

Villalta, Castillo and Torres offer an overview of existing theories to answer this question in the region. The economic perspective argues that individuals weight the costs (of eventual punishments) and benefits to decide whether they engage in crime or not.

The social-structural perspective views fluctuations in crime and violence as a result of changes in societal structures, culture and institutions; it supports the idea that rising trends in criminality are a consequence of changing labor market conditions, exclusion, and economic crises.

The political perspective argues that recent processes in LAC countries, such as transitions towards democracy, shifts in political agendas or even the “War on Drugs”, have weakened state control and left inefficient local governments in charge of public safety.

Finally, social disorganization theory argues that, similarly to language, roles and social expectations, antisocial and criminal behaviors are socially learned.

According to this view, areas within cities with low low-income levels, racial heterogeneity, and residential instability are more likely to experience social disorganization. Depending on the country context, a combination of these theories helps explain crime in LAC.

Empirical research offers support for the different theories: the sense of impunity in some countries encourages law offenders to engage in criminal activities; the lacks of confidence in police and justice systems sometimes prevent victims from reporting crimes (moreover, it’s not rare that corrupt police collaborate with organized crime in some countries, for money or fear); support for extralegal violence is significantly higher in societies characterized by little support for the existing political system; and the lack of economic opportunities also plays a role as a strong correlation between crime and youth unemployment has been found.

Evidence also demonstrates the effect of inequality in crime (the case of Mexico is discussed by Enamorado et al, 2016).

As I have mentioned in the past, the pavement of development in LAC requires effective governance as pre-condition to improve productivity, inclusion and resilience. That is, effective governance is about creating socio-economic opportunities, strengthening institutions and enhancing citizen security.

These are challenging tasks as these figures show. Fact-based initiatives such as INFOSEGURA which aims to promote and improve the quality of information on citizen security in the region, are critical public policy instruments to address this challenge.

*Homicides rates are expressed per 100,000 inhabitants throughout the post.

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By Luis Felipe López-Calva
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 24 2019 (IPS)

Sustainability is constitutive of the concept of development. Just as economist Amartya Sen has argued that there is no point in discussing the relationship between development and democracy, because democracy is constitutive of the concept of development, there is no point of trying to disentangle sustainability from the notion of development itself.

A key foundation to promoting sustainable development is thus strengthening resilience. We know that the development trajectory is not linear. Shocks of many different types disturb this path, and vulnerability to these shocks can slow down (or even reverse) progress. Resilience is the ability to return to a predetermined path of development in the shortest possible time after suffering from an adverse shock.

Luis Felipe López-Calva

This makes the probability of distribution over intensity of shocks one with “thicker tails” which in turn makes insurance more complex and expensive. As a recent IMF report found, “natural disasters occur more frequently and cost more on average in the Caribbean than elsewhere—even in comparison to other small states.” Since 1950, 324 disasters have taken place in the Caribbean, inflicting a loss of over 250,000 lives and affecting over 24 million people.

This #GraphForThought uses data from the International Disaster Database EM-DAT to look at the damages caused by storms in the Caribbean during the period 1963-2017. As the graph cycles through time, we see countries repeatedly experiencing storms.

Each grey dot represents a country’s loss in property, crops, and livestock due to total storm damages in a given year – expressed as a percentage of its national GDP (using GDP from the year before the storm).*

On average over time, we can see that countries in the Caribbean suffer yearly losses due to storm damages equivalent to 17% of their GDP (for years that they were hit by storms). Of course, this varies greatly across nations both due to the severity of storms as well as the size of countries’ GDP—ranging from an average loss of 1% in Trinidad and Tobago to an average loss of 74% in Dominica. In 2017 alone, Dominica lost the equivalent of 253% of its GDP (during Hurricane Maria).

This was just two years after it lost the equivalent of 92% of its GDP (during Hurricane Erika). These losses are compounded by losses resulting from other extreme natural events, such as earthquakes, floods and droughts.

The repercussions from these damages have long-term consequences at the national level. A recent cross-country study on the impact of cyclones on long run economic growth found that impacts on GDP persist as much as twenty years later.

Moreover, they find that “for countries that are frequently or persistently exposed to cyclones, these permanent losses accumulate, causing annual average growth rates to be 1-7.5 percentage points lower than simulations of “cyclone-free” counterfactuals.”

Thus, developing resilience to the repeated shocks faced by countries in the Caribbean is critical for ensuring their ability to pursue long-term growth. As the World Development Report 2017 argues “long-term growth is less about how fast one grows than about how often you trip along the way.”

The damage caused by extreme weather events can also lead to long-term consequences at the household-level. Using data on typhoons in the Philippines, a recent study found that in addition to the loss of durable assets, household income was reduced which is passed on through decisions to spend less on items such medicine, education, and high nutrient foods—decisions which may have long term consequences for the development of human capital.

In order to mitigate the serious consequences of shocks on development, we need to focus on strengthening resilience. The capacity of the countries in the region to strengthen the resilience of households will depend on the processes that allow households to make decisions that help them build their adaptation mechanisms.

Efficient, effective and flexible social protection systems to incorporate victims; early warning systems for disasters; investment in mitigation of environmental risks; and impact-resilient social services and infrastructure, are some of the ways through which governments in the region could build and strengthen resilience.

Moreover, in order to effectively strengthen resilience, we need to rethink how we evaluate it. Traditionally, economists have approached this notion from a perspective of ‘flows’ – such as GDP, consumption or income.

However, if we rely solely on this type of approach, efforts to strengthen resilience could take place at the expense of the depletion of the ‘stock’ of assets. For example, the recovery of GDP at the expense of natural capital.

Thus, if we truly believe that ‘sustainability is a constitutive element of development’, we need to move from an evaluation space defined by ‘flows’ to one that also includes a measure of ‘stocks.’ We need to think more broadly about the ‘wealth of nations’ by valuing not only their GDP but also their stock of natural, physical, human and social capital.

* Note: The sample is restricted to countries and years for which both storm data and GDP data are available.

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