SANTIAGO, Chile, CMC – Delegates attending the CAF-ECLAC Annual Conference 2024 at the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile, have called for scaling up and improving productive development policies in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“To achieve a more productive, inclusive, and sustainable development pattern, it is urgently necessary to scale up and improve productive development policies,” ECLAC said. “This goes to the heart of the development models in the region and is essential to their transformation.”
ECLAC said the high-level event, entitled “The challenge of scaling up and improving productive development policies in Latin America and the Caribbean,” brings together Economy, Trade, and Industry Ministers, Deputy Ministers, senior executives, and regional and multilateral organizations experts.
ECLAC said the conference reflects on and addresses “in-depth the elements that would enable moving forward on designing and implementing a regional agenda for productive development policies to guide national and subnational governments, academia, private actors and other members of civil society in the region in carrying out joint actions for sustainable and inclusive productive development.”
José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, ECLAC’s executive secretary, and Sergio Díaz-Granados, the executive president of CAF-Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, inaugurated the meeting.
It Fe featured a panel of authorities on productive development policies in Latin America and the Caribbean that included the participation of Nicolás Grau, Minister of Economy, Development and Tourism of Chile; José Antonio Ocampo, professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and former Minister of Finance of Colombia; Soraya Caro, deputy minister of business development of Colombia; and Gonzalo Rivas, head of the competitiveness, Technology and Innovation Division at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
In his welcome remarks, Salazar-Xirinachs recalled that “the root of the problem is that the region has been immersed in a low-growth syndrome or trap for the last decade.”
He stressed that “growth per se is not everything since the aim is to have inclusive growth, which would reduce poverty and labor informality, create good jobs, and create an environment more conducive to reducing inequality. It would also be green and sustainable growth that is friendly to nature and the planet.
“If the region invests enough in the transition to renewable energies, electromobility, the circular economy, to more dynamic sectors that drive growth, such as the care society (among others), and moves towards these transformations, the result will necessarily be higher and more sustained growth that is more diversified and more technologically sophisticated. And that is what productive development policies are about,” Salazar-Xirinachs said. “It is about inducing dynamism and transformation in the economy and society.
“Because in productive development policies lie the toolbox for steering growth in certain directions and towards higher and more sustained rates, which means orienting economic transformation processes towards more inclusive and sustainable development patterns,” he added. “We at ECLAC have been saying that it will not be enough to insist that our countries and their territories scale up and improve their productive development policies.
“Delving deeper into the ‘whats’ and the ‘hows’ behind this premise will be key,” Salazar-Xirinachs continued. That is why we understand the space that we are organizing today as a new opportunity for these reflections and as a time to promote renewed collaboration, not just between CAF and ECLAC on productive development policies but also between public and private actors in the region.”
Díaz-Granados said that “the region continues to be stuck in low productivity that limits its growth and, therefore, the possibility of achieving the goals of overcoming poverty, of greater equality and, ultimately, of greater well-being for our citizens.
“That is why we value the relevance of this kind of debate where our commitment is focused on pouring all our efforts into supporting the transition that the region needs, backing this challenge of moving towards sustainable development,” he said.
In the first session on productive development policies in the region, ECLAC said the ministers, deputy ministers, and authorities present stressed the importance of making progress on issues such as institutional capacities, technological development, financing, productive linkages, support for small producers and tax incentives “to reverse the stagnation in productivity seen in the majority of the region’s countries and to be able to articulate productive development policies that, in the end, would allow for improving all people’s well-being, which is their ultimate goal.”
ECLAC said the CAF-ECLAC Annual Conference continued with four sessions on issues such as the role of development banking in productive development agendas, productive development policies with a territorial approach and cluster initiatives, closing human talent gaps for productive development, and opportunities for collaboration between governments, the private sector, development banks, and other relevant actors to scale up and improve productive development policies in the region.
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