– Key Indicators on Latin America and the Caribbean’s Economic, Social and Environmental Development
SANTIAGO DE CHILE – A statistical overview of the sociodemographic, economic and environmental development of the region’s countries is provided in the Statistical Yearbook for Latin America and the Caribbean 2025, an annual report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) released Wednesday.
One of the United Nations regional organization’s most important publications, this document contributes to generating knowledge about Latin America and the Caribbean and is therefore an essential reference for the comparative analysis of countries with descriptive statistical data.
The Statistical Yearbook 2025 is divided into three chapters. The first explores demographic and social aspects, including indicators on population, labor, education, health, housing and basic services, poverty and income distribution, and gender.
In the social realm, the main novelty is that this edition incorporates the results of the Multidimensional Poverty Index for Latin America, which was presented in April 2025. The data corresponding to 2024 shows profound gaps between the region’s countries. On a regional level, multidimensional poverty affects 27.4 percent of the population, with great dispersion among countries. Guatemala and El Salvador have the most critical situations, with levels above 50 percent, while Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica have an incidence below 6 percent. Overall, the results confirm that multidimensional poverty continues to be a structural challenge in the region and stress the need for differentiated and sustained public policies.
Gender inequalities, meanwhile, are manifested in the indicators in a cross-cutting way. In particular, women between 20 and 59 years of age face higher levels of poverty than men in the same age group. In 2024, women aged 20 to 59 who live in urban areas have a poverty rate that is 1.28 times greater than that of men in the same age group. In the case of rural areas, the difference is 1.15 times greater.
The second chapter of the Statistical Yearbook 2025 presents economic information that includes statistics on national accounts, the external sector and price indices.
The publication shows that economic activity in the region continues to exhibit moderate growth. In 2025, regional growth is seen notching 2.4 percent, with subregions performing differently. While South America has limited growth (2.9% in 2025), the group made up of Central America and Mexico marks a deceleration due to the evolution of the Mexican economy (1.0% in 2025). In the Caribbean, aggregate growth varies notably depending on whether Guyana is included or excluded (5.5% versus 1.9 percent in 2025, respectively), reflecting heterogeneity in the subregion’s production dynamics.
The domestic scenario is compounded by the complex evolution of the external sector. After registering declines in 2023, goods exports and imports show signs of a moderate recovery (3.6% and 3.2% in 2024, respectively), although with uneven performances between countries. The information in the Yearbook allows for observing changes in the composition of foreign trade, in the terms of trade, and in the current account balance of Latin America and the Caribbean (-2.8% in 2024), along with the relative weight of intraregional trade, which remains limited.
The third chapter offers environmental statistics from the region. These include metrics on physical conditions; land cover; ecosystems; biodiversity; energy, water and biological resources; emissions; environmental quality; climate change; and extreme events and disasters.
Latin America and the Caribbean is a region highly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, which are manifested in phenomena such as floods, storms, droughts and landslides, among others. According to updated figures, in 2024 alone, 82 hazardous events and natural disasters directly affected more than 12 million people and caused the loss of more than 800 lives. The total cost of the damage and economic losses related, directly or indirectly, to these disasters in the region was $21.777 billion dollars.
Over the last 34 years, the region has seen its forest area shrink, and it has lost natural forests in particular, both in absolute terms as well as relative to overall land area. Between 1990 and 2023, the proportion of regional forest cover has decreased systematically from 53 percent to 46 percent of the territory (from 1.07 billion hectares to 909 million hectares). In this same period, the loss of land area covered by forests throughout the region totalled 160 million hectares. Despite this decline, the region is still home to one-fifth of the world’s forests.
Finally, the report addresses environmental quality by analysing air pollution, which poses a significant risk to human health. The results show that none of the region’s countries complies with the World Health Organization’s guidelines regarding particulate matter (PM2.5).
The Statistical Yearbook is published in a print version and an online format, offering a selection of tables and graphics that summarise the statistical information from a regional perspective. The interactive web version facilitates navigation and access to the information presented in the print version, linking graphics and statistical tables to the data series available in ECLAC’s databases, which allows for accessing information that is more detailed and refers to a much broader historical period. It also contains an additional chapter explaining methodological aspects and references to the data sources used.
The information underpinning the Yearbook comes from CEPALSTAT, a platform that brings together and disseminates updated statistical information on the region’s countries. This data – which is collected, systematised, and published by ECLAC – can be visualised by territory through its Geoportal, which facilitates the analysis of regional statistics across different areas.
Given that most of this information comes from national statistical offices, central banks, international bodies and other official institutions, ECLAC invites users to pay attention to the sources and the technical notes presented in this publication. The data is obtained using international methodologies and standards with the aim of ensuring the greatest possible comparability between countries, which means that these figures may not necessarily coincide with national data.
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