 And it's going to focus on the new regional human developed report published by UNDP on Latin America. This report focused on the vicious cycle of low economic growths and high inequality experience in Latin America over the last decades. Of course, this is not a new topic and it's a issue that's been grappled with both with academia and policy. However, what's interesting is that this report focused on ways of breaking some of the factors that may reinforce both the reproduction of this connection between low growth and high inequality. To talk about this finding, we have lined up a very impressive panel, if I may say so. First up, to talk about the report, we'll have Vish Philipi Lopez Calvup. Vish Philipi is Assistant Secretary General and UNDP Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. He's been working for UNDP for quite some time and he worked before for the World Bank as well, where he co-directed and led the World Development Report in 2010 and I have very good, very important memories of that time and was happily involved in that report too. Sadly, Vish Philipi was caught to an urgent trip this morning, so he's unable to join us in person. However, he was kind enough to send us a prerecorded intervention and he'll talk about the results. So we'll listen to that shortly. Then to respond to the results, we have Carlos Gadi. Carlos is a research fellow here at UNIWIDER and he's only Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Vigo in Spain. Carlos has a PhD in Economics from Barcelona and he's worked for many, many years on issues around poverty and inequality. Then he at UNIWIDER, he leads the with database, the World Income and Equality Database. And then after Carlos, we will have some brief comments from Marcella Melendez. Marcella has kindly agreed to step in and represent UNDP. She's the Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at UNDP. She has a PhD in Economics from Yale University and she studied at the University of Los Angeles in Colombia, which is a place very close to my own heart. And Marcella will talk a little bit more about some of the findings and hopefully also she also has kindly agreed to take some of the Q&A at the end of the, questions at the end of the presentations. So without further ado, welcome everyone. And if we'll start then with the pre-recording intervention by Luis Felipe. Thank you very much for joining us today. I really want to express our gratitude to WIDER, to Kunal Sen for this invitation and to Carlos Gladín with whom we have for a long time discussed these issues related to inequality. This is a great opportunity for me and for UNDP to join forces with WIDER, particularly for the Bureau of Latin America and the Caribbean at UNDP. And as we agreed with Kunal and Carlos when I was invited, I will discuss issues related to the broader theme of inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. But I will not refer specifically to the recent human development report that was prepared and launched few months ago in our region and was led by Marcella Melendez and her excellent team of researchers. Marcella is the chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean here at UNDP. So she's gonna be here to respond to the questions after my presentation. There were some logistics issues for the presentation but we really wanted to stick to this date and time because we know that there's a lot of interest in this topic and I really hope that this will be the first of many interactions that we have with you on this topic. As you very well know, we're already planning to have some joint endeavors that will for sure enrich this conversation. So thank you to you for inviting us and thank you to all of you who are joining this presentation. So again, it's not strictly speaking the presentation of our regional report but I will be referring throughout my presentation to many of the elements that we go in depth in the report. So the most important element here is when we talk about Latin America, we talk about two structural issues in the region depending to whom you talk to, they will emphasize either the fact that the region is a very high inequality region in the world but also it's the growth cycles of the region are pretty much linked to commodity booms and busts and the idea is that in general there is the notion that it's a region with low productivity growth and mediocre growth. So what we do in the report is to try to link these two aspects and try to show the challenge through which this phenomena reinforce each other and that is why we call it this trap of low growth and high inequality and then we show other manifestations or other implications of this trap for the region. So what we know first is that we have a region with mediocre growth. If we compare the growth of Latin America and the Caribbean with other regions, we clearly see that we are certainly not among the best performance and actually we have a pretty poor performance in terms of economic growth as a region and if we look at the specific countries even the countries that have been more successful in our region like Chile, Uruguay or Panama I'm talking of course pre-pandemic and that actually managed to get out of the middle income trap to underperform compared to the fastest growing economies in the globe. So we have a problem of low growth but only that also as we show in the report the growth is also very volatile. So in a way also that volatility is linked to the mediocre longer term performance in terms of economic growth. If we look at the number of years with negative growth in our region by country we see that Argentina leads with 17 years of negative growth since 1980. This is until 2019. Of course, if you want to add 2020 you just have to add one year to each of these numbers because all the countries suffered a contraction during the pandemic. But you see that Colombia, the mod resilient economy in the region all the way to Argentina but overall the region has a higher number on average of negative growth years compared to the standard. Rather than the average what I mean is actually that many countries have a higher number of negative growth with respect to the benchmark that would be the USA in this case. We look at the, we decompose the determinants of growth in the region and we look at factor accumulation versus productivity. We see that the main issue with the region indeed is low growth of productivity. We all know that old statement by Paul Krugman who said that in the long term productivity is not everything but it's almost everything. So there is a serious concern with regards to the low productivity growth in our region. On the other hand, we have very high and persistent inequality. Carlos, you have discussed this in your work and we know that Latin America has structurally high inequality. And even though there was a reduction in income inequality as measured by the Gini index in household surveys not corrected for the underestimation of income at the top. And you know that we published this with Nora Lustig in 2010 to analyze the determinants of this inequality reduction, mainly driven by a reduction in the skills premium and complimented by a better incidence of public spending mainly due to conditional cash transfers. But the largest share of this reduction was driven by labor markets. Basically a compression of the skill premium or the gap between high skill versus low skill wages. So this is the fact but then in 2014 or so this flattens again and it gets stuck at a relatively high level. So even though there is a reduction we were still stabilized again at a very high level of inequality. So there is this if we control by either human development index or GDP per capita which either Latin America has but some papers called excess inequality, right? So the expected level of inequality given the level of development should be lower but actually you observe higher levels of inequality. If you look at perception which are of course there is a full chapter in which in the report we go in depth into these perceptions. But what we can see is that there is mismatch between what we actually measure in terms of the shape of the distribution versus what people think about what the distribution is and certainly what people would like the distribution to be. And also if you ask people they will certainly tell you that they consider the situation in their countries as being unfair in terms of different access to services and so on. So this inequality of ex perceptions and these perceptions are also linked to the idea of the reduction in trust in institutions because people think that as expressed by Latino barometer in new ways that we jointly for which we jointly prepared a specific module with Latino barometer at UDP. We see that high share of the population in our region consider that the system that the countries are governed with bias to benefit certain groups in society. So if you link that to actually objectively the manifestations of that means malfunctioning of the system or malfunction of the system we see that one element in which the undo influence undo influence of certain groups that have that affect or distort public policy it manifested for example in market power. So the idea that we have highly concentrated markets in certain sectors and that generates rents that are beyond what normal return to capital would allow. So basically the idea that in one chapter in which there is a very, very detailed empirical work with very specific data for many countries that show that the estimates of the markup show that Latin America has unusually high markups historically. So even in OECD countries where there's concern about the reduction in competition in certain sectors and the increase in the markups we see that Latin America has persistently showed very high markups. And we also see a few big firms that have a lot of power in the markets and many very small firms large share of the labor in Latin America and the Caribbean is actually firms that have five workers or less. And another high share is in self-employed. So if you add those two you have that most of the labor in our region is actually either based more firms or self-employed. So in that sense, it's also structural characteristics that we analyze and that is systematically generating these appropriation of rents by large firms in markets that are less competitive. In addition to this and to close this picture of the persistence of inequality we see that the redistribution capacity of the state in Latin America and the Caribbean is relatively low. If you take perhaps Argentina which the issues related to the sustainability of that redistribution as we have seen recently but there was as you know, a large increase in public spending in the last, when I will say in the last but between 2002 and 2015 you see Uruguay that has a higher level of redistribution compared to the rest of the region particularly after the fiscal reform of 2007 but in general countries in Latin America have very small reduction of the Gini in this index before and after redistribution before and after taxes and spending. So in that sense, the redistribution capacity of the state is not there to compensate for the inequality we saw before. So in that sense, all these reinforces these patterns reinforce each other. As I said, if you go to the report you will see how these are linked and I will mention a few elements of this in a minute but also the other characteristics or characteristics of our region is related to violence. So we have 9% of the population in the world and one third of the homicides in the planet. So that means that we're way overrepresented as a region in terms of violent deaths and that's a structural characteristic that as we show in the report for example, the links to inequality. Well, the high levels of violence affect for example, investment in human capital affect disproportionately the poorest but at the same time also inequality controlling from many other aspects has a marginal impact in the, in violence, on violence, sorry. So there's a very, very detailed study that shows that inequality per se while not being the only cause has historically being a driver of violence in our region. So that is this excess violence that we can also call it that when you control for the level of inequality that explains a good deal of the victimization rate but there are other determinants that make this victimization rate even higher of what you would expect. So there are systemic issues that make this violence as a way to sort of enforce contracts in our region and that reproduces the level of high inequality because the proportionality affects the poorest but also affects investments that could increase productivity. So in a way it relates to the whole trap. So one particular element of inequality that is discussed in the report is intimate partner violence. We see that not only historically and we show that but also because of the COVID crisis that has been an increase but that is not COVID pandemic is not the cause of this. This is a structural element in our society that is really concerning in terms of public policy. How to make the household really the safest place for women to be, which is not the case that is unfortunately today. So related to this is as I mentioned before the idea that we have very small firms and typically informal workers. So there have been a lot of discussion on informality particularly I would say I was looking recently to a work done by EXAC and it's mainly about how to measure informality but there is not much about the economics of informality. So I think what we in the report bring to the conversation is really a deep understanding of the economics of informality as an outcome of different aspects related to environment and policy that interact to lead to this very limited space for firms to grow and then informality as a characteristic as a structural characteristic of the labor market that leaves people either unprotected or protected through mechanisms that we will show in a minute could be distorting. So this informality has led to policy responses which by the way ILO shows that the pandemic may have an effect even in increasing even further the levels of inequality. It is very important to say that this informality leads to policy responses that as we show in the report based on work by Santiago Levy that you may know from the past but now we do it for a set of countries to try to understand what is the structure in terms of institutional fiscal environment that leads to that outcome of inequality that we show then that how these policy responses may actually be distorted even further and creating more informality, lower productivity and higher inequality. So our approach is basically that these two aspects of low growth and high inequality are self-reinforcing what we call the trap and that it leads to perceptions of inequality and unfairness that are very clear that is manifested in terms of concentration of power which is another chapter of the report for which I will show you a few numbers just recently and then create violence as a mechanism to either as an exit from the social contract or as a way to enforce contracts and we see how the policy responses that try to deal with this issue of high inequality and low productivity end up reinforcing the pattern. So at the end it's an issue related to governance and when we talk about the governance what do we mean? We mean basically agreements among actors that decide the rules and policies. So there is this policy arena that which determines what policies will be implemented and that these two outcomes that we showed you as I just showed you in this case mediocre growth high inequality, high vulnerability, high levels of conflict. No, not conflict but violence as a way to process conflict. That redistributes the fact of power so that gives more capacity for certain groups to influence that policy arena. So the policy arena leads to again policies that reinforce that pattern. But that policy arena also determines the rules. So sometimes actually the rules of the game are also distorted in a way that the jury power is distributed. So that infinity loop as we call it in the WDR 2017 of governance is systematically reinforcing the pattern that we observe here in terms of the outcomes. mediocre growth, high inequality as a self reinforcing pattern related to this, the facto and the jury power manifested in this policy arena which is where these power asymmetries are manifested. So we need to discuss how we change that in terms of what policies we have to design in a different way which rules ideally would have to change to lead to different outcomes. And in order to be able to do this we need to create new coalitions of actors because of course in order for the political economy of these to lead to changes we need to rebalance those power asymmetries by creating these new coalitions of actors. So basically the idea is these three areas to strengthen effective governance or to create what we can call a renewed or strengthened social contract which involves new policies, new rules of the game and new actors in that policy arena. So one proposal I want to emphasize which is something we really go in depth in the report among others but I want to emphasize this one is social protection as a key entry point to change the dynamics of this process. So first, as I said is very high level of informality but informality is not the cause of the problem. Informality is already the symptom of a systemic element in the economy, the labor markets that leads to that informality as an outcome, right? The environment, as I said, institutional environment, fiscal, social protection that leads. One of the main elements, not the only one but one of the main elements is a strict link between access to formal social protection and the type of job that people have. So one essential element here is how to delink the job status from the social protection and that's why we call for a different way to think about social protection. The idea is first to differentiate very clearly between those things that are social insurance and are related indeed to work and to the type of job that people have and the other is social assistance which has to do with whether people are poor or non-poor in terms of their capacity to generate income structurally. So in that sense, what we have done is that we get confused between these two things. And for example, you can have many social programs in our region and we of course show that for several countries in which one characteristic to be able to access programs for poverty alleviation depend on people not having a formal job. Whereas these two elements are different. One thing is to be poor or non-poor and the different thing is to be formal or informal. So that is how do we start delinking these two things? So first aspect is let's go for social protection that is truly universal in the sense delinked from job status and we create a basic package of social protection that is available to everybody financed through general taxes in a way that is of course explaining the report and it will depend on each context how you do it. Second is that it's truly inclusive in the sense that it's not only universal the jury but actually universal the fact though how to really bring all those who were excluded from the social protection in the past. Very important is this element of being growth friendly that means that is associated with incentives for employment creation, incentive for firm growth and not in a way that is distortive and this starts the environment in a way that leads to poor productivity growth and then to low growth. So social protection has also needs to be also growth friendly and of course it has to be fiscally sustainable otherwise it could lead to this cyclical contractions or crisis because we typically end up increasing power spending and eventually collapsing because of the fiscal unsustainability that is created. So basically then the social protection that we go in detail in the report about how to make it universal inclusive growth friendly, fiscally sustainable that could be one entry point to try to start changing the dynamics of the whole system and try to then create a different dynamics of higher growth and lower inequality. So this is the proposal that we have in the report. I'm sure you can, I mean, you will have comments on the way we propose but the idea is precisely to go in that direction and we're trying to now start to have, start having specific conversation in every context with our teams to try to see what it really means in terms of the changes again. I insist in terms of rules, in terms of policies and who are the actors that we can bring to the table to support these changes in order to try to revert this and really address these characteristics from their structural causes and not only trying to respond with short-term policies. So I know it's, it has been a very succinct and very general presentation of ideas that are much deeper but Marcela will be here. She led the world with the team to go into the details and different chapters. She can be here to also answer your questions but as I said, I hope this is the first of a series of conversations and collaboration with Wider. Thank you again for the invitation and it has been a pleasure to present this to you. Okay, well that was a great overview of the report and now I pass the floor to Carlos who's going to have a response to it and in the meantime, anyone who has questions please do add them to the chat box. Carlos. Thank you, Patricia. I would like to thank Luis Felipe for the presentation of this very rich and important report on inequality in the Latin American region. Luis Felipe, who I, as he mentioned, I had the opportunity to meet and discuss with him issues around inequality, polarization a long time ago. And I would like to thank also Wider for allowing me to participate in this discussion. I'm gonna share the slides. Can you see it? Okay, so the starting point of the report is that the region has been successful in substantially reducing poverty in recent decades and improving the access to basic services. This was detailed in the 2019 human development report. But however, it has been less successful in combating inequalities in general. There was substantial reduction in income inequality in the decade of the 2000, but this was limited if compared with the large initial levels and has a stall if not reverse more recently. As a result, and this is the main message of the report, the region is in a development trap with slow and volatile economic growth combined with high income inequality. To put this in context, I couldn't help to use the world income inequality database with that we hosted you, Wider with standardized information on the income distribution all over the world. So we can see here, for example, that growth in per capita income in the region follow the world's trend until recently when it seems to lose track. But these, as mentioned also by Luis Felipe, is in contrast with impressive trends shown by East Asia and the Pacific over the same period. In terms of inequality as measured by the unique index or the unique profession, but replicated by other inequality measures, the unweighted average across countries has shown a substantial decline, but the curve has been flattened more recently and the level remains persistently high, especially if compared with other world regions. It's similar, for example, to South Asia and below the level of Saharan Africa when these regions are compared using income instead of consumption, which is the usual case, but still above the world average and above most other regions. If countries are weighted by their population reflecting the average experience of Latin American people, the trend in recent years is similar. The reduction is larger because it reflects the strong declines in inequality in the largest countries like Brazil, Mexico, or Argentina. The situation doesn't change much if we measure inequality among all citizens in the world, also in the region, regardless of the country where they live, given that inequality in countries does not seem to change much over time. To fight inequalities, it's important to understand why inequality declined or increased. The report based on previous research by UNDP, by U.S. Penepeo, by Nora Lustig points out the fact that inequality declined by a combination of factors, including large economic growth, creating opportunities, a reduction in returns to higher education that narrowed the skill and skill wage gap and redistribution via cash transfers with institutional factors like labor unions or minimum wage also creating a role in some cases. An important strand of the literature of earnings inequality has recently raised the question about the importance of considering the nature of tasks that workers perform, not only their skills. So recent developments in the U.S. and other industrialized countries point to an important role played by changes in the demanded tasks due to technical progress or international trade. This scenario, the press demand for workers in routine tasks, middle income jobs, it can now be executed by computer technology. This would resolve in polarization in either earnings or in employment for both. So exhibiting stronger growth of employment and earnings at both extremes and hollowing out the middle of the earnings situation. However, most of this literature has focused on developed countries. And we know very little about the effects of this process on earnings inequality in developing countries. And for the reason why they're in association with UCT and IBS launched a cross-country project in 2019 with a focus on countries in the global south. The project engaged with 11 countries studies all over the global south with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru in the Latin American region. And on the main findings, of course, we find that it's clear that the key role of the expansion of education of workers mainly secondary and tertiary in the case of Latin America, pushing the scale of premium down when it's not matched by the demand. Therefore contributing to lower inequality. But we also observed a transformation, an important transformation in the composition of the workforce in Latin American economies that deserve being considered. With a trend, no exempt of rebounds in recent years to increase workers in high skill, less routine jobs, mainly in the service sector often in paid and formal employment. And this came at the expense of elementary occupations in formal self-employment, in agriculture and manufacturing sectors. However, we found weak omics evidence of polarization in either employment or earnings with exceptions in recent years in Brazil and Argentina. But with no clear connection with the task approach. This seems to be more related with the conventional propo for which growth associated with skills than the following the following out of the middle, which is more associated with the tasks. So when earnings inequality is mainly driven by changes in working structure. So as opposed to automatic effect of changes in the workforce composition. Occupations are important, but we can say that inequality occurs mainly within occupation, not between them with the exception of Chile. And this seems to be intensified over time. There is a general tendency to observe that the higher earnings in less routine occupations, particularly in Brazil, that there is no clear evidence of changes in the returns to these routine tasks explaining the observed trends in equality in the real world. And regardless of the direction of overall training equality increasing or declining, there is a clear desequalizing effect of having a more educated workforce when returns to education are kept constant. What has been called the paradox of progress. And for example, it's important to explain recent increasing inequality in Brazil. So the report also highlights the existence of important horizontal inequalities in the region by ethnicity or by gender alongside this vertical inequalities, as well as the importance of people perceiving this inequalities as being excessive and unfair, which relates both to outcomes and processes. There is a perception of, in a reality of excessive concentration of power in elite capture. And the report analyzes the effects of market power, both in business and for unions on equality. Just to mention a striking example, it's striking to see that people perceive, for example, inequality being more inequality or this being more unfair in countries like Costa Rica or Uruguay than they do in Nicaragua or Salvador. It would lead to a discussion of role of aspirations or poverty or social stratification in shaping these perceptions on inequality, which is discussed in the report, but I think it's opening also new areas that need to be further investigated. The report, the subject is perceptions describing the report also helped to shape higher demands for a distribution. And these higher demands face a reality of a weak fragmented and dual welfare system, trapping large shares of informality and with societies prone to experience various types of violence. So on summary, the region is caught in an inequality trap. The situation of high inequality can be aggravated by the consequences of the pandemic, in particular due to the digital divide and also make harder to address crucial issues like fighting climate change. But they think all these issues are highlighted in the report, but the report also discusses important exits, ways to overcome these problems. And I think that's the main, the most important contribution of the report. So thank you very much. Thank you so much Carlos. And now over to Marcela. Marcela, would you like to react to Carlos' presentation while we wait for questions to come in from the audience? Thank you, Patricia. Thank you Carlos for reading the report and for highlighting some of its messages. I think probably I can use this little time to strengthen some of the messages and to clarify. One of the things that we are looking into very carefully is the relationship between market structure and the distribution of income. We are finding that, and that's part of the story of the skilled premium, but it's like an additional ingredient. We're finding that if we look at the distribution of business sizes, including self-employment on the left tail and compare it to income distribution, the shape of these distributions is very similar and it's particular for the region as compared to more advanced economies to the US and Europe. When we look at the income distribution and take like just only workers, like a personal income, the ratio between the income received by people that are on the top of the distribution in the 90th percentile related to the person who is in the middle of the distribution is much higher in Latin America than in advanced economies but what is very particular is that the distribution is much thicker on the lower tail. So we're saying we need to pay attention to that side too. There is a story about concentration of business and concentration of size someone extreme that is similar to the one that we're talking about in Europe and in the US that is probably even more pronounced because ownership is more concentrated in the upper side of the business distribution but on the other extreme we have something that is particular and different. When you look at like the dispersion, the relationship between the income of the poorest of the workers related to those in the middle, then the distance in Latin America is much higher than in the rest. And so that connects to I guess two different stories that we're trying to bring evidence to because we think these are important conversations. One of them has to of course with a market power translating into business political power and reforms that do not happen because they are blocked by the interest of particular groups and examples is a competition policy for instance. Our countries lack working competition policies, competition agencies, most of them in some countries they type of institutions are non-existent totally non-existent. And we're saying this is one of the tools that you have to somehow contain a power at the top and the fact that it doesn't exist or that it is weak has to do is not independent of that type of power. But on the other side we have an alternative explanation that comes through through the regulatory environment. And when you look at the regulatory environment and you look at social protection systems and you look at that systems and we're saying we need to pay attention to how we are set up and we need to invest in productivity enhancement because we are finding evidence that there are factors and this is like what is behind the story that we're telling that there are factors that change a little bit the way we address productivity and inequality typically in our heads. We're saying these are not two competing avenues there are things that are making us both highly unequal and they're making us grow poorly and have low productivity. We are given a message that productivity enhancing policies may be inequality reducing and that inequality reducing policies may be productivity enhancing. And one important like I've mentioned like Elvis Felipe extended himself in talking about social protection policies but for instance, when we speak about violence we are a we've known and it's more established that there is a relationship between inequality and violence and that the relationship is even stronger than it is and more robust than it is with poverty but we're also making a case that it goes the other way around that violence is making us more unequal when it starts lands in a level playing field and that it's like making like hurting people's welfare but it's not only that but it's also impeding the human capital accumulation and it's deviating resources that could go into development and that are instead going into security big security expenses and things that countries have to spend in and it's deviating private investment and distorting decisions that private investors. So we're trying to look at things that change the story and I will close with that in the sense that we are saying listen, there are some things that are particular to the region that make the region different to others that if we address properly could probably move the region in the correct direction on both fronts. Thank you so much, Marcela and yeah, very good points made there and maybe I'll pick up on them a bit later but first we have a few questions coming in so let me just open up to everyone. We have a question from Ricardo Santos who's in the UNUIDA office in Maputo. Ricardo, do you want to just ask a question live? Then we can unmute you. I'm not sure the technology is there but. Hello. Yeah, go ahead. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Hi, so first of all, thank you so much for creating this opportunity and even if, well, remotely or virtually thanking for the presentation that was really, really interesting and Marcela, please go by that. My question is, looking into the presentation one question that came to me was so what is it known of the role of group inequalities in Latin America and the persistence of the income inequality? Research that we've conducted on Brazil looking at the period of inequality reduction that happened under the workers' party governments. That research indicates that it is possible to reduce both vertical and group inequalities but then it may be the case that such initiatives are not easy to sustain politically and maybe even socially. So what is it known in other Latin American countries and in Bolsonaro's Brazil? Over. Thank you Ricardo. Maybe Marcela, would you like to take that one and Carlos, if you have anything to add, please do. Horizontal inequalities, I'm glad that you bring that to the table because they are another phase of inequality in Latin America and I think the way forward to reduce a group inequality is different than the one that we would need to work with to solve income inequality. When I think about monetary inequalities, it's impossible not to think about fiscal systems, how we tax people and how we spend and that alone very hardly will help us bring for instance equality in political agency and political participation of ethnic minorities or level the playing field for women in the labor markets or improve the class divide. Some of our countries, our societies are hardly classists and segregated. We try to lay out the facts and show how these are ways in which inequality is pervades still many of our countries. We don't have and the report doesn't have any sort of, it's not meant to have any policy prescriptions in order to tell countries how to go about this but it tries to give some general lines of action and it really depends on the group but when we think about a group inequalities I think a conversation that is very important is a political participation and how you open avenues at the local levels for people and groups that have like vulnerable groups that lack a political voice to start participating. And so a recovering or transiting towards a better working democracies and or spaces where people can participate. I think it would be part of the solution. I don't have the answer, the magic answer as to how to do that but I think that's one of the ways. And I think we have to do a lot of pedagogy with respect to for instance, inequality suffered by LGBTI plus groups. There's a lot, these are people who are discriminated in many of dimensions of their lives and are also a group that is particularly target of violence and there is a lot of I guess misunderstanding in terms of what makes us different or equal things that we have embedded in our heads. And I think it has like this applies to when we think about gender roles, these gender biases and biases that we're brought up with and that we very often do not like realize and come to face unless somebody else points them out or something particular happens close to us that points them out. So there's a great challenge in terms of communicating and reaching I guess households inside so that there can be transformations. I don't have better answers. We don't look particularly at Brazil. We don't look particularly at any country because we are looking at the original level but we are I think bringing up always that speaks closely to things that we see in all of the countries of the region. Carlos, would you have any comments to add? No, yeah. I think Ricardo points out a very important point that is the need to align the fight against vertical and horizontal inequalities because I think the context in which vertical inequalities are reduced because the cycle, the expansion of social transfers and the economic cycle are favorable but that is not enough to reduce some horizontal inequalities especially when they are very well rooted in the structure of the country. And I think for example in some gender inequalities or inequalities against indigenous populations in Brazil you need like being more proactive to make sure that the reduction of inequality involves also these most excluded groups especially when they are very poor or locating specific or remote areas, et cetera. For example, in the case of Brazil I think the access to education measures to improve the access of education of black people or indigenous or the protection of indigenous populations, lands, et cetera are very important to make sure the reduction of inequality benefited these people. And now we are like in the opposite situation the cycle, the general cycle goes against reducing inequalities because of the change in the economic cycle but also the changes in social transfer but also the hostile environment towards protecting these groups and reducing the small protection that they were building around and protecting them and then you will move from a virtuous cycle to the opposite. Thanks Carlos. We have a question here from Donna Danz if you want to ask a question with the audience. Yep. Yes, good morning everyone or good afternoon where you are. Thank you very much. So all the presenters for such a wonderful presentation so informative. First, I want to ask if the recording will be made available. And secondly, my question was what information do you have on the Anglo-Caribbean? And if you do have information on inequality and poverty is the phenomenon similar? Is it similar or dissimilar to the Latin American countries? And I guess some focus should be on the Anglo-Caribbean countries in general because of the natural disasters and the seemingly increasing natural disasters that they're having. And I'm sure it's affecting the vulnerable groups very much and maybe pushing them further down the ladder. So that's my question or comment. Thank you. Thank you very much. Marcelo, perhaps again. Yeah, from the information available we know that some of the Caribbean countries are among the more unequal in the world. The Caribbean looks like even more unequal than Latin America. I don't know if you remember that graph that was Felipe showed. And so it's not, there is heterogeneity but I should say the following. We tried as much as we could to bring the Anglo-Caribbean into the report. There is a huge lack of good data. So household surveys and censuses are not systematically done over time. Some of the information is a bit outdated. There's a lot of, there's a big data challenge for the Caribbean and it's very uneven across countries. So this is why we cannot explore further things in the Caribbean. We are looking now carefully within UNDP in my office at countries that do have household surveys even if they are not as frequent as in other countries but that basically the story of the Caribbean in terms of inequality is similar and perhaps even more complicated as you were rightly pointing. So to extend that this is a region that is extremely exposed to phenomena from climate change and through devastation that happens recurrently. We brought, I don't know, it's not part of the Caribbean but we are trying to look also at Haiti which is a particular country in the region and I think it's like a big pain in the region. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, Macella. Now I have a question and I thought it was really interesting that this report touches upon the violence issue, which is not common, right? And, but from what I understand it's mostly data on homicides but obviously, you know, Latin America has had very long running conflicts, including Colombia. And I am really, I was really pleased to see this link running from conflicts to inequality which we didn't focus the opposite direction but actually in these long run conflicts this is gonna be the case and there's gonna be several people also which are gonna be affected differently, say poor farmers in Colombia poor farmers in Peru have been heavily affected and then there's a whole issue of urban violence in Central Americans of course but the issue that makes it really complicated sometimes some of these policies that get put in place like even the cash transfer programs for instance lead into more tensions and social tensions and conflicts we saw a rising protest for instance as well which was kind of a backlash against the lack of middle class involvement in some of these programs. How, where do you see, Macella? How can we disentangle this really complex nots of armed conflict, protests, social tensions, urban violence and then not also social policies having the beneficial effects that we might expect? I wish I had the answer to that question but let me say this, that the report looks at much more than homicides. The thing is that quantitative work that can be done basically uses the data that exists. So they are like, you know that data better than myself but like it's basically homicides and some victimization rates, no. So there is also a huge lack of data to explore at a deeper level what goes on in each of our countries. However, one of the background papers of the report by Ana Aljona looks like did a wonderful, I'd say a literary review with a purpose looking very carefully at all of what we can collect and she's looking like we're basically understanding that we are the most violent region in the world but the type of violence that is present in each country is not necessarily the same and intensity varies across countries. And we're looking at social, political and criminal violence and we're talking about the violence coming from a trade of illicit. This is like, you cannot talk about violence in Latin America without talking about difficult issues. So there is I guess one strand of violence that has to do with this social unrest and unhappiness and as Luis Felipe was saying, like an exit mechanism when you don't feel that your voice is being heard but there is also these other sources of violence that are so complicated. When you look at policy and the impact of transfers I guess that the big challenge is to understand how they fall into spaces that are not empty in the sense that there are a lot of, I hate to say this because I sound very much like an economist but they don't look at how they can distort incentives. So you do things with the best intentions and sometimes put policies in place with the best intentions without realizing how people might respond and the several results, for instance of conditional cash transfers that has been documented is the increase in pregnancies of young women in order to be able to claim the transfer. So that's, you need to like, I guess be aware of what can go wrong. I would still defend cash transfers and monetary and conditional cash transfers as not the 100% of social protection as one of the pillars of social protection as what they are meant to be. This type of policy that is there to really prevent people from falling into poverty and to come to rescue in moments of shock like the one that we have been doing. The thing is that we cannot expect on transferences alone to eradicate poverty. And this is why we are trying to shift the emphasis to look at the other pillar of social protection that is very broken and doesn't work well in Latin America, the pillar of social insurance. These are two things that should be complementary and not substitutes in a social protection system that works well. The developed world, everyone in the developed world, everyone in the world needs to have some sort of protection against the risks that we all face without being poor. Health risks, longevity, this capacity. So this is why we're saying, listen, we have to rethink how we build this because one of the strands, one of the pillars wasn't able to respond during the pandemic. And there is a lot of mismatch in terms of the incentives from the pillar of transferences and the pillar from social insurance that are making us be so informal and that are contributing to having these labor markets with so many people working on their own as self-employed or in very tiny businesses which go against both their own livelihoods in terms of the income that they can make but that also hurt the way our countries grow because these are very low productivity. Thank you. I really like that this conceptual framework around the pillars. I think it's really interesting and I wish you could explore more but the time will be three minutes over at the time. So, Marcela, thank you so much for your kindness in joining us. I did it last moment but it was really appreciated that you could come join us in this great meeting you and perhaps last words for Carlos before we close the session. No, just to thank you, Marcela and Felipe and the NDP for this great report and I recommend to read it. People are lazy to read the long version they have the shortest version too. Indeed, I highly recommend it as well. Again, thank you and thank you to Carlos as well and Marcela once more and thank you for all the participants and I hope to see you all soon. Thank you, Nicky, all. Thank you. Bye.