Highlights and Shadows in ECEC Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean 1 Cynthia Adlerstein and Marcela Pardo INTRODUCTION There is extensive evidence that Latin America and the Caribbean (hereafter, LAC) exhibit one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world and, by international standards, middling levels of educational inequality. Commenting on both inequalities, Cox (2010, p. 1) noted that their historic roots ‘are deep and the contempo- rary economic, social and political institutions and forces that sustain them are durable and powerful’. It is a heterogeneous region, where diverse indigenous cultures and the Spanish cultural heritage co-exist, and several languages are spoken (Stavenhagen, 2004). According to UNESCO (2014), the LAC region is composed of 41 countries, 2 which the IMF (2016) classi- fies as both low and middle income. In terms of social justice, the income inequality is exten- sive throughout the region (Fraser & Honneth, 2006). For example, in 2014 the population of Chile, the country with the largest gross domes- tic product (GDP) in the region, had a per capita income 3.4 times higher than the per capita income in Nicaragua. Also, citizens of countries located on the southern end of the region, like Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, have higher average incomes (nearly double) than inhabitants of other countries of the region (BID, 2016b). Comparing worldwide, LAC is the world’s second most unequal region with an estimation of 52.9. According to 2014 data cited by Caetano & De Armas (2014), this figure stands slightly below Sub-Saharan Africa (56.5), while it is followed at a distance by Asia (44.7), Eastern Europe and Central Asia (34.7). This inequality is even more acute when referring to children. The total population of the LAC region is 625 million (Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe, 2016), where approximately 64.5 million are children under 6 years old (UNESCO- WCECCE, 2010). As a distinctive feature of the region, though the young population increased 2.5 times between 1950 and 2005 and is expected to decline by around 17% between 2005 and 2050 (Saad, 2009), about 20% of under 18-year-olds lived in poverty 11 BK-SAGE-MILLER_ET_AL-170165.indb 180 05/09/17 11:53 AM