Executive Secretary of ECLAC Alicia Bárcena:
“Social Progress Is Not Limited to Social Policies”

Photo: Lorenzo Moscia/ECLAC

In a few weeks, the most important ECLAC biennial meeting, its Thirty-fourth session, will be held from 27-31 August in San Salvador, El Salvador. At the event, the delegates of more than 50 ECLAC member and associate States will participate. Besides examining the Commission’s activities, this forum will help analyze topics that are relevant to Latin American and Caribbean development.

In this context, ECLAC will launch a new position paper entitled Structural Change for Equality: An Integrated Approach to Development, furthering the proposals set forth in 2010 at the previous Session, celebrated in Brasilia, Brazil.

In this interview, the Executive Secretary of ECLAC Alicia Bárcena gives a preview on the issues to be considered when designing the Commission’s roadmap for the coming years.

During the last Session, held in Brasilia, Brazil, in 2010, ECLAC enshrined equality as a value that should be at the core of all development agendas. What is your opinion on Latin American countries’ having welcomed this message?

We humbly, yet very firmly believe that the ideas contained in Time for equality: closing gaps, opening trails have deeply permeated public agendas in our continent. Equality, as set forth back then, implies fostering capacity building, technical progress, work opportunities and a universal access to social benefits and welfare networks all over the production and social structures.

Equality also includes establishing a deliberative democratic order where a wide range of social stakeholders are represented and have their voices heard, and where the State ensures civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights. The latter implies responsibilities regarding promotion, redistribution, regulation and control.

Placing equality at the core of all these factors meant breaking with an economic paradigm having prevailed for at least three decades. Today, we are witnessing the emergence of public policies inspired by this new vision all over the region.

But listen: The proposals enshrined in Brasilia and the ones we are going to discuss in San Salvador do not derive from the enlightened impulse of a bunch of experts, but are a systematized look over the demands that have crystallized our America. These emerge from our societies in the shape of needs denoting a conscious and committed population, who also disapproves of the status quo. The efforts of ECLAC have focused on listening to, analyzing and matching the ambitions that are present among and considered legitimate by our peoples.

How will the new document to be presented by ECLAC in El Salvador, entitled Structural Change for Equality: An Integrated Approach to Development, further the proposals set forth in 2010?

We are moving forward regarding continuity and deepness. We believe that, nowadays, the fact that “social progress is not limited to social policies” needs to become more explicit. Conversely, equality and inequality, both regarding assets and rights, are strongly conditioned by issues on which we now seek to focus more: the production structure, technological development, labour market gaps, macreoeconomic management of cycles, territorial organization, capacity development, social protection and political participation.

For ECLAC, social equality and an economic dynamism that transforms the production structure are not at odds but actually complement each other. The great challenge is to find synergy between them. In an integral development vision, as the one we set forth now, equality is built on a virtuous circle of economic growth and a sustained increase of productivity and social inclusion.

We suggest that macroeconomic policy converges with industrial policy. We are convinced that not only do fiscal, monetary and exchange policies promote nominal stability and soften the economic cycle, but also are instruments for boosting long-term investment and diversify the production structure.

Concretely, we propose that industrial policy play a central role in two directions: on the one hand, that it allows granting improved capacities and competitiveness to the existing sectors with a clear growth potential and through technical progress; and, on the other, that it helps diversify the production structure by creating new, high-productivity sectors, as well as an increased environmental sustainability and efficiency, and move towards a greater convergence in the productivity levels of the economy.

This industrial policy must be incorporated considering the scientific-technical level. This is an imperative in a world that goes through a revolution, including new information and communication technologies, biotechnology and nanotechnology, in which new ways of knowing and producing come up at a frenzied pace.

Accordingly, we believe it is critical that societies make a political decision to channel production and technology through ways that take into account future generations and under a long-term perspective.

How can the countries in the region combine the immediate challenges emerging from the current, uncertain international economic scenario with a long-term strategic perspective like the one proposed by ECLAC?

If, as a region, we do not address knowledge, technological and sustainability gaps, these will become even larger once the uncertainty affecting growth in the United States and worsening the situation in Europe disappears. We continue suffering from the structural effects deriving from the debt crisis we have been facing in the last three decades and we have not been able to reach the necessary investment levels yet.

Today, if we do not see to it that our resiliency to global economic adversity becomes more clever, active and pragmatic by letting our region flow into the global stream of technical progress associated to new technologic paradigms, any other time might be too late. At least, we believe it is necessary to reconfigure production and growth patterns so that they become environmentally sustainable.