The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused an unprecedented impact in Latin America and the Caribbean. What started as a public health crisis has become the worst economic and social crisis in a century and has exposed significant structural gaps in the region’s development model. The health catastrophe has impacted on areas as varied as production, economic growth, labour, transport, education, housing and mental health. It is a crisis of global scope, with consequences that are here to stay, along with the challenge of learning to live with those consequences and prepare for possible new epidemics in the years to come. However, it has also created opportunities to strengthen social cohesion by forging new social and fiscal compacts to support a big push for sustainability and progress towards a new development model in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (ECLAC, 2020a).
This document seeks to explore these aspects in greater depth, and discusses various alternatives for implementing some of the lines of action of the Regional Agenda, in relation to the role that social protection must play in dealing with disasters, with an approach geared towards a transformative recovery with equality and sustainability. The first chapter presents an analysis of the matrix of social inequality and the Regional Agenda for Inclusive Social Development in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new empirical data that have emerged on the vulnerability of the population and the way in which the different axes of inequality have influenced the direct and indirect effects of the pandemic in the region, with a special focus on the situation of the middle-income strata.