Via the World Bank: Covid-19 in Latin America: A pandemic meets extreme inequality. Excerpt:
In late May, the World Health Organization declared that Latin America has become the new epicenter of the Covid-19 Pandemic. It has already been noted that the region’s high levels of inequality have limited the effectiveness of various containment policies, thus contributing to this sad distinction. In this post we look at the reverse direction of causation and ask what effects the pandemic is likely to have on the region’s entrenched inequalities.
We argue that the impact of the pandemic will itself be highly unequal in Latin America : both in terms of health and economic outcomes, and along income, spatial, gender and racial dimensions. Worse yet, this will be true both in the short-term, during the current “lockdowns”, but also in the medium and longer-term. Nonetheless, the policy responses in some countries suggest that there may be a silver lining: the crisis might provide an opportunity for rethinking the region’s structurally unequal social contract.
In the short-term, inequalities in how individuals can cope with stay-at-home orders are particularly striking in the region. Living conditions – including access to such basic amenities as piped water and adequate sanitation facilities – are highly unequal. The homeless and those living in cramped and precarious housing in urban slums, without access to water and sanitation, face huge difficulties in implementing social distancing and maintaining the higher levels of personal hygiene that are now required. ...
Almost one in three Bolivians has no access to piped water at home. Fully half of Brazilians have no access to improved sanitation – a sadly remarkable number. Large numbers of Hondurans and Peruvians are also deprived of access to these basic services. These deprivations mean that those who were worst-off to begin with are also most vulnerable to the virus.
This also implies that Covid-19 will not be color- or race-blind in Latin America. Afro-descendants are over-represented among slum dwellers in Brazil, Colombia, and many other countries. Infection and death rates will almost certainly be higher for black Latin Americans than for whites, much as in the United States. Indigenous descendants are also more vulnerable in a number of Andean countries, and in the Brazilian Amazon.
A second pre-existing inequality that is likely to make the underprivileged more vulnerable to the pandemic is that between formal and informal workers in the region. According to the ILO’s definition, the informal sector accounts for 34% of the GDP in the region, with 53% of total employment being informal: ranging from 23% in Uruguay to above 80% in Bolivia. Perhaps most vulnerable among the informal labor force are self-employed or own-account workers, who typically account for between 20% and 40% of the labor force in Latin America, or even higher in countries such as Bolivia and Colombia.
