75 years of ECLAC and ECLAC thinking

The fast-moving process of globalization at the start of the twenty-first century opened up opportunities for the region, but also gave rise to new development challenges. Together, the extraordinary growth in world trade and rapid technological change led to an increase in inequalities within and between nations, while the pattern of growth led to accelerated environmental deterioration around the globe.

In September 2000, after a decade of major United Nations conferences and summits, world leaders gathered at United Nations Headquarters in New York to adopt the Millennium Declaration, committing their countries to achieving a set of eight predominantly social goals by 2015, known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The MDGs included efforts in a variety of areas, from halving extreme poverty rates to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS or providing universal primary education, forming a framework and galvanizing unprecedented action to meet the needs of the world’s poorest populations. In line with the MDGs, since the beginning of the twenty-first century ECLAC has emphasized the social dimension in its work, while increasingly integrating the dimension into its economic and institutional analyses and proposals.

The Millennium Declaration stated that the central challenge at that time was to ensure that globalization became a positive force for all the world’s people, while also acknowledging that its benefits were very unevenly shared and its costs were unevenly distributed: “only through broad and sustained efforts to create a shared future, based upon our common humanity in all its diversity, can globalization be made fully inclusive and equitable.”

In line with this vision, in its sixth decade ECLAC called for balancing of the asymmetries of globalization to achieve development based on productive transformation, distributive equity and social protection and cohesion.