The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) cut its growth forecast for the region to 2% in 2026 on Thursday, 22 October 2026, two-tenths of a point below the 2.2% it had estimated in August. The United Nations body left its 2027 projection unchanged at 2.5%.
The downgrade confirms that the region will string together another year inside the narrow band it has occupied since the start of the decade: growth was 2.3% in both 2023 and 2024, and 2.4% in 2025.
A continent moving at several speeds
The regional average hides very wide gaps between economies. According to the table released by the commission, the 2026 projections are:
- Venezuela: 6.5%
- Panama, Paraguay and El Salvador: 4.5% each
- Dominican Republic: 4.4%
- Guatemala: 4.1%
- Nicaragua: 3.7%
- Honduras and Costa Rica: 3.5%
- Peru: 3%
- Ecuador: 2.6%
- Colombia: 2.4%
- Brazil: 2.1%
- Argentina: 1.9%
- Mexico: 1.6%
- Island Caribbean (excluding Guyana): 1.2%
- Uruguay: 1%
- Bolivia and Chile: 0.2%
- Haiti: -1.5%
- Cuba: -10.3%
Chile and Bolivia share last place among the economies that are still growing, at two-tenths of a point. Haiti and Cuba are the only countries with negative projections, and Cuba's 10.3% contraction is by far the steepest figure in the table.
The sharpest contrast is between the region's two largest economies: Mexico, at 1.6%, would grow less than half as fast as Peru this year and about a quarter as fast as Panama or Paraguay, while Brazil sits close to the regional average at 2.1%.
What drove the cut
ECLAC attributed the adjustment to "an international context of high uncertainty". In its statement, the commission said that "geopolitical tensions, disruptions to logistics routes and the lower predictability of trade policy" are reshaping the conditions in which the region's economies operate, weighing on external demand and pushing up production and import costs.
Energy and food prices add a second layer, and there the effect splits in two depending on each country's position: commodity exporters may benefit from higher prices, while "importing economies face pressure on their costs and on household purchasing power", the commission warned.
That split helps explain the table. Many of the countries with the highest projections are small, open economies in Central America and the Caribbean, while the larger manufacturing exporters of South America sit near the bottom.
A downgrade that was already under way
This is not the year's first adjustment. In its April update, ECLAC had already lowered the regional estimate for 2026 from 2.3% to 2.2%, in an exercise that also cut the South America forecast from 2.9% to 2.4% and the figure for the English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean excluding Guyana from 2% to 1.2%.
With Thursday's revision, the projection has now been cut twice in six months and moves further away from the 2.5% the commission still defends for 2027 — a number ECLAC itself made conditional on the international outlook and on the possible effects of El Niño.
With information from EFE, BioBioChile, Infobae, Forbes México, Portafolio and ECLAC.
