By Martin Murphy The BBC's Spanish-America business correspondent

Globalisation has made wealth distribution more unequal and pushed up unemployment in Latin America and the Caribbean, the United Nation's Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean has said.

At the end of its 29th session in Brasilia, the commission (Eclac) said that increasing demands for competitiveness posed by globalisation harmed employment, education and social protection interests in the region.

Ocampo denies neo-liberal policies have caused harm

"Latin America and the Caribbean grew an average of 3% in the past years, while in the period between the 1950s and the 1970s the region was growing at an annual rate of 5%," Eclac executive president Jos� Antonio Ocampo told the BBC's Spanish Service.

However, Mr Ocampo denied that economic reforms carried out in most of the region during the past decade had been a waste of time.

He said that, thanks to the implementation of free-market policies in the 1980s and 1990s, the region had succeeded in taming inflation and had attracted rising levels of foreign direct investment.

But he acknowledged that there was a long way to go before Latin America and the Caribbean could reap the full benefits of globalisation.

Wide-ranging concerns

Eclac's report said that 44% of Latin Americans lived below the poverty line, with a further 25-30% of the population having a good chance of slipping below it the near future.

Though some countries, such as Chile, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, had performed well in recent years, exports from Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for only 4% of world trade.

Eclac further highlighted the globalisation-linked problem of immigration - 15 million of the world's 150 million immigrants came from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Many delegates in Eclac's session, which attracted ministers from various countries in the region, agreed that immigration should be regulated by multilateral agreements.

Eclac was also worried about the state of democracy in Latin American and the Caribbean.

"Democracy in the region has been suffering one blow after another," Jos� Antonio Ocampo said.

"The failed coup in Venezuela was just the latest example."