The economic crises of the 1980s resulted in a substantial decline in per
capita income in numerous African and Latin American countries. These were
followed by the adoption of structural adjustment programmes, which
emphasized macro-economic equilibrium. They included the privatization of
state enterprises and the opening ofmarkets to world trade, all of which have
led to an increase in the number of people unemployed or working under
extremely precarious conditions. In Latin America, the number of poor
increased in the 1980s by some 60 million people. In the early 1990s, the
Cepal estimated that one out offive Latin Americans lived in extreme poverty.