Shifting gears to accelerate shared prosperity in Latin America and Caribbean

documents.worldbank.org - June 1st, 2012 - Louise J. Cord, Leonardo Lucchetti, Carlos Rodriguez-Castelan

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have made laudable progress in the past fifteen years in reducing poverty, building the middle class and promoting prosperity for all levels of society. Extreme poverty, defined in this region as life on less than $2.50 a day, has declined by half, while in 2011, for the first time in recorded history, the LAC region had a larger number of people in the middle class than in poverty. Across this region of close to 600 million people, the poor have been gaining faster than the already well off.

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