A look at the Latin American informal economy

• Those millions of street vendors, domestic workers, garment factory employees and others cannot work from home or afford to stay home if they're sick.
• Many in the region live in multigenerational homes with little sanitation, and travel on usually crowded public transportation that doesn't allow for social distancing.
• All this increases SARS-CoV-2 exposure and reduces the effectiveness of lockdowns.

The big picture: Extreme poverty in the region grew during 2020 to 33%, its highest point in two decades, and women’s participation in the job market plummeted.

• The global drop in travel threw many people out of work and hundreds of millions of dollars in public revenue were lost, hitting tourism-dependent and poor Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba especially hard.
• Experts fear Latin America and the Caribbean could take longer than other regions to bounce back from the pandemic’s economic effects, with the possibility of a “lost decade” of little to no growth.