Regional Report Warns Central America Facing Its Most Severe Setback in Decades

The Seventh State of the Region Report was presented today in the capital city of Belmopan. The report serves as a monitoring tool that tracks Central America’s progress in sustainable human development and regional integration. Including data from Belize, the report warns that the region is experiencing its most severe and dangerous conditions since emerging from the political and military conflicts of the late 1980s. According to the findings, the regional setback is driven by several key factors, including widening development gaps, failures to advance sustainable human development in the post-pandemic period, an increasingly volatile political climate, escalating geopolitical tensions, and the impact of an internal diaspora that has weakened the region’s capacity to address long-term strategic challenges. Report Coordinator Alberto Mora highlighted these concerns during his presentation. 

Alberto Mora, Report Coordinator: “The landscape today looks very different from our first report in 1999. Back then, we noted that for the first time in 30 years the region had just come through a positive decade. In this period, it had regained political stability and was entering a period of economic and social progress. Today, however, we warn that the region finds itself in its most dangerous position since that time. The first main idea states that development gaps within the region have depended over the last three decades. A key factor widening these gaps was the profound transformation the region experienced during this period. We change our societies, economy, natural resources and also our political systems.”
Marco Hidalgo, Researcher: “In addition to declining coverage, the results of PISA 2022 tests revealed serious education quality issues in five of eight countries of this region. The low coverage rates for secondary school will stop us from improving the education levels of the economically active population in the future. As you can see in 2022 between 41% and 88% of the workforce had incomplete secondary education or less, a level too low to achieve higher labor productivity. While there were some environmental improvements during the pandemic, once health restrictions were lifted and economies reopened, countries continued deepening the environmentally unsustainable patterns of previous decades. The third main idea in this report shows that the region is facing its worst and most dangerous political period since the era of military conflicts. The region has become a laboratory of political systems, a wide variety of regimes co-exist in this small territory, and this diversity in itself poses significant risks.”

While the majority of the report was focused on the region, there were important findings as it relates to Belize. The findings of the report show that Belize, along with Honduras and Costa Rica, has intermediate levels of dependence on fossil fuels in the region, with Belize being the second highest at 55%. The aging population process in Belize is slower than in other Central American countries. The share of the population over 60 years old in Belize (7%) is lower than in Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic (over 10%). Belize, Panama, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic have the highest GDP growth during the period 2018-2023. In Belize, it was related to the dynamism of tourism. As it relates to journalism, the findings show that political and partisan polarization hinders the independent work of the media. The full report is available for public review on Programa Estado Nación’s website.