Who are society's most vulnerable?
Let’s say, you look at the poorest, which in my view are the most vulnerable in society. In Latin America this is about 10% of the entire population of the area, which is about 80,000,000 living on $2.5 a day, which is the new poverty line derived by the World Bank. We know that among the poor children and women are often the most vulnerable. Also people in old age. These groups are vulnerable for a number of reasons: because they cannot access labour markets, because they are vulnerable and subject to discrimination or because they face barriers to entering markets. Children cannot work because they’re not strong enough. Women are often discriminated against, and the elderly, they don’t have the physical power to work. So these are, in my view, the most vulnerable.
But there’s another category that’s even bigger. It’s about 40% of the population of Latin America. Those living on above $4 a day but under $10 a day. They are not middle class; they are not considered to be poor but they are technically defined as vulnerable to poverty. Why? Because they’re really exposed to shocks like financial crises; they lose their jobs; they lose their small businesses; they are also really vulnerable to environmental shocks. They are also the ones who often live in the slums of big cities, which suffer from all sorts of risks like crime. And they are often exposed to flooding and fire and higher costs of transportation to go to the market place. This is perhaps the biggest group of people in Latin America who are very vulnerable.
Also, within this group young people are very vulnerable. Especially when you think about how one in every five people aged 15 and 25 doesn’t work or study in Latin America. So when you think about that, that's 20% of the young population who don’t have any justification for thinking about the future – they are demoralised. They are not working, and they are not studying, they are not doing anything. So these are the ones who are recruited by criminal organisations, like the drug cartels. This is a social issue, a very severe problem in Latin America.
