SANTIAGO, Chile, (ECLAC) – The green transition, artificial intelligence, increased demand for food, and the reconfiguration of the international order open new opportunities for Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of investment, productivity, and quality employment.
The region is well positioned to leverage them due to strategic assets such as its renewable energies, critical minerals, food agricultural capacity, and biodiversity, though these assets will not automatically translate into development, stated José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) at the launch of the report Latin American Economic Outlook 2026: Deepening Integration into a Changing Global Economy (LEO 2026), held during the XVI Ibero-American Business Meeting.
The high-level United Nations official warned that the world is undergoing true “ruptures” in globalisation, multilateralism, and geopolitical competition. These ruptures create opportunities for a region that is still facing three development traps: low capacity for growth; high inequality and weak social cohesion; and insufficient institutional capacities.
In this context, he highlighted three messages:
- Scaling and deepening productive development policies to diversify and sophisticate economies and strengthen institutional capacities to implement them, leveraging the foundations that already exist in the region.
- Advancing toward deeper and more pragmatic regional integration in a market of more than 660 million people. “Regional integration is not only a trade agenda; it is also a productive development agenda,” he stated.
- Using digital technologies and artificial intelligence to help overcome the three traps, accelerating its adoption in MSMEs and strengthening the region’s technological companies. “We cannot simply be consumers of these technologies,” he emphasized.
He also highlighted the European Union as a strategic partner, through the Global Gateway and the UE-Mercosur Agreement and called for connecting these agendas with the productive development policies of countries and their territories.
The report spotlights the region’s potential: it generates 64.3 percent of its electricity using renewable resources, more than twice the global average; it has 48 percent of global lithium reserves and 36.6 percent of copper reserves; and it provides 18 percent of global agricultural exports.
According to conservative estimates, artificial intelligence could create approximately 565 billion dollars of additional production in Latin America between 2025 and 2030. Regional integration is also a source of growth to be leveraged: intraregional trade is, on average, six percentage points of GDP below its potential, and supplying within the region up to 10% of inputs that are currently purchased outside the region would increase national value added in exports.
To realise this potential, LEO 2026 recommends closing gaps in infrastructure, abilities, and financing, advancing regulatory convergence, and aligning digital agendas with productive development policies, also highlighting the eLAC Digital Agenda, coordinated by ECLAC, as a regional platform for convergence among these areas.
“In a world that is becoming fragmented, Latin America and the Caribbean’s response must not be to close itself off but rather to integrate better, within and beyond the region. What is at stake is our capacity to move from opportunities to results and take on a central role in the transformation of the global economy,” concluded Salazar-Xirinachs.
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