The likely extent of the recovery in the Caribbean and Latin American economies next year will be insufficient for the region to reach the economic activity levels seen in 2019, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) says in its ‘preliminary overview’ of economies of the region’ for 2020.
In December ECLAC had announced that the region had experienced a contraction of minus 7.7 per cent in 2020 but that it would see a positive growth rate of 3.7 per cent in 2021, though it says that this will be insufficient to recover the pre-covid economic activity levels seen in 2019.
The slow recovery rate, ECLAC says, must be seen in the light of the fact that of all the regions in the developing world, Latin America and the Caribbean have been the hardest hit by the crisis resulting from COVID-19. ECLAC noted that the region had been on a “low-trajectory” during the decade that had preceded the advent of the coronavirus, while last year it had faced an unprecedented combination of negative supply and demand shocks which are now translating into the worst economic crisis over the last 120 years.
