Latin America experienced a spectacular growth in the last decade. However, World Bank reported that some people have not enjoyed the economic growth, while the economy slowdown will continue.
From all the people in Latin America, indigenous peoples are the ones who received the least benefit from economic boom in the last decade. Researches at the World Bank reported, although there are more than 70 million indigenous people escaped poverty, but the indigenous people are still lack behind. With 14% of the poorest are the indigenous people, while indigenous people are only 8% of total population in the region.
World Bank vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean Jorge Familiar told Reuters during the launch of the report, "If we want to achieve our goals of reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity, we need to fight discrimination and exclusion for all Latin Americans and ensure that all have the same opportunities to live a better life."
Based on the report, indigenous people group continue to lag behind others in the economic. From all the Latin American nations, only Chile was able to reduce the gap between poverty rates for indigenous and non-indigenous people from 13% in the early 2000's to 3% in the 2010's. While other countries experience the same or even wider gap.
Brazil and Bolivia are two countries which larger gap, as the gap in Brazil increased from 10% to 22% in a decade. While in Bolivia 23% gap in the early 2000's is increasing to 24% in the early 2010's.
World Bank found another striking data, as it dug deeper into its analysis for education, age, gender, family size, location, and occupation. In those factors, there are more than 40% difference between group. Indicating that if an indigenous people and non-indigenous people are living in virtually identical situation, the indigenous people will less likely to escape poverty than non-indigenous people.
In order to improve the situation, World Bank researchers suggested to look at indigenous people poverty issues through their views and culture. Nearly half of the population of indigenous people live in cities, which 36% of them living in insecure, unsanitary and polluted environments. World Bank's poverty expert, Oscar Calvo-González said as reported by Quartz, "These results suggest that Indigenous Peoples face specific challenges in benefiting from growth and getting out of poverty."
Meanwhile in terms of economic growth, Latin America has faced a slowdown for three consecutive years. In an interview with Forbes, Senior Latin America Economist at FocusEconomics Ricardo Aceves said, "Following three years of slowing growth, Latin America's economy actually contracted in 2015. It's the first instance of negative growth since the global financial crisis hit it in 2009."
After the region experienced a economic growth in the last decade, Latin America is experiencing slowdown. Meanwhile, the last decade's economic growth has not reached most of indigenous people living in the region.
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