Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Rebecca Bodenheimer. Anthropology and History Expert. Rebecca Bodenheimer, Ph. Twitter Twitter. Latin America includes 19 sovereign nations and one dependent territory, Puerto Rico.
Most people in the region speak Spanish or Portuguese. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Bodenheimer, Rebecca. Definition and List of Countries. What Is Latin America? What Is Dollar Diplomacy? Consequently, there is a risk that the international community will mis interpret this situation as meaning that the region need not be prioritized in the Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Nonetheless, the Sustainable Development Goals are not merely a strategy to combat economic poverty, but also a multidimensional strategy that defines a complex world map of priorities.
This article develops a multidimensional taxonomy that addresses the fundamental dimensions of sustainable human development, beyond classifications based exclusively on per capita income.
South America is a highly urbanized region, with over 80 percent of people living in cities. Central America and the Caribbean are slightly less urbanized at around 70 percent.
Development and human settlement are not spread evenly across the region, however. Several countries in Middle and South America have a primate city. Primate cities are those which are the largest city in a country, are more than twice as large as the next largest city, and are representative of the national culture. Not all countries of the world have a primate city. The region is also home to several megacities. A megacity is a metropolitan area with over 10 million people. Mexico City, the capital and primate city of Mexico, has a population of 22 million people.
Megacities often face distinct challenges. With over 10 million people comes a significant need for affordable housing and employment. Megacities often have large populations of homeless people and, particularly in Middle and South America, sprawling slums.
This immense population also needs a carefully managed infrastructure, everything from sanitation to transportation, and the developing countries of this region have historically had difficulty meeting the demand. Despite the challenges faced by large urban populations, rural to urban migration continues in the region. As in many parts of the world, poor rural farmers migrated to the cities where industrial development was clustered in search of work. In general, the cities of Middle and South America follow a similar model of urban development see Figure 5.
The central business district, or CBD, is located in the center of the city often alongside a central market. While some colonial buildings were demolished following independence, cities in this region still typically have a large plaza area in the CBD. As industrialization occurred, additional industrial and commercial development extended along the spine, which might be a major boulevard. The spine is often connected to major retail area or mall.
Surrounding the commercial area of the spine is the elite residential sector consisting of housing for the wealthiest residents of the city often in high-rise condominiums. Around the CBD is the zone of maturity, an area of middle class housing. The outermost ring in a typical Latin American city is the zone of peripheral squatter settlements. Residents often build housing out of whatever materials they can find such as cardboard or tin. Globally, around one-third of people in developing countries live in slums, characterized by locations with substandard housing and infrastructure.
Estimates vary regarding the total number of people who live in slums but it is likely just below 1 billion people and continues to climb. In Brazil, these sprawling slums are known as favelas and over 11 million people in this country alone live in favelas. It has transitioned from a squatter area with temporary housing to more permanent structures with basic sanitation, electricity, and plumbing. In some cases, those who live in the slums of Middle and South America are not unemployed but simply cannot find affordable housing in the cities.
Rural to urban migration here, as in other parts of the world, has outpaced housing construction. Even some lower and middle managers are unable to find housing and thus end up living in the slums.
Although income inequality in Middle and South America has fallen in recent years, this region remains by some measures the most unequal region in the world. If current trends continue, the top 1 percent will have amassed more wealth than the bottom 99 percent.
In Mexico, around half of the population lives in poverty and while the rich in Mexico have seen their wealth climb dramatically in recent years, poverty rates remain relatively unchanged. This inequality has been a product of geography but has also impacted the landscape, as well.
Farmers in Middle and South America have struggled with land ownership after their alienation from the land during colonization. This either worsens rural poverty or contributes to rural to urban migration as farmers leave to find work elsewhere.
Government responses to income inequality vary. Some countries of Latin America and the Caribbean turned to socialism in the hope that government-controlled development would be able to more fairly distribute wealth. Often these socialist endeavors were financed with the exports of natural resources, such as oil or coffee, but this created a vulnerable dependency on foreign trade. In Venezuela, for example, where Hugo Chavez ushered in a socialist revolution at the turn of the 21st century, falling oil prices in threw the economy into steep decline leading to massive inflation and a shortage of domestic products see Figure 5.
Governments like Venezuela often relied too heavily on income from exports and invested little in developing their own infrastructure, instead simply relying on importing the goods they needed. In general, spending on social services remains relatively low across the region.
The wealthiest people in many of these countries hold their money offshore in order to avoid taxation, but this also prevents governments from being able to use this tax revenue. Many governments have also given tax breaks to large, multinational corporations who seek to do business in the region providing a short-term economic increase at the expense of long-term development planning.
Inequality is not just an issue of poverty, however. It can also relate to unequal access to education and political power. Among the indigenous population of Bolivia, most work in agriculture and around 42 percent of indigenous students do not finish school compared to just 17 percent of non-indigenous students. There is a distinct cycle between education and poverty with educational advancement directly linked to economic advancement.
In some areas, access to adequate education, particularly among indigenous populations, remains low, limiting the opportunity to narrow the income gap. To learn more about cookies, click here.
The World Bank is working with member countries to accelerate support for the pandemic and other development priorities in the region. The Ecuadorian government set an ambitious target: vaccinate 9 million people in just days.
Wonder what key skills will be needed in a post-pandemic job market and how to acquire them quickly? The health crisis sharply contracted growth, which has had an enormous social and economic impact, given that it occurred after several years of sluggish economic growth and limited progress in social indicators. It also followed major social unrest in some countries in late Where We Work.
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