Latinas contributed $1.3 trillion to U.S. economy, new report says. That number could be even bigger

cnbc.com:

Latinas are making substantial contributions to the U.S. economy.

The female Hispanic population contributed $1.3 trillion to gross domestic product in 2021, an increase from $661 billion in 2010, according to a recent report funded by Bank of America.

That marks a real GDP growth rate of 51.1% between 2010 and 2021, meaning an economic contribution that's 2.7 times that of the non-Hispanic population.

The total output of U.S. Latinas in 2021 was also larger than the entire state of Florida that year, the report noted, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In fact, only those from California, Texas and New York, respectively, were larger that year.

Despite those large figures, some economists think that U.S. Latinas could be contributing more to GDP than the report's figure.

Belinda Román, an associate economics professor at St. Mary's University, said that there's activity in various areas that the data may not be capturing. Child care is one of those.

«A lot of that is uncompensated care,» she said in an interview with CNBC. «Interestingly, there are a lot of Latinas in that space that you're not going to see in these numbers, so I think to some extent it may not be big enough actually.»

Economist Mónica García-Pérez also believes the figure could be bigger, saying that some of Latinas' «unmeasured» contributions — such as being a stay-at-home mom that's providing care for other neighbors' kids, for example — allow «other groups to participate in the labor market.»

She also pointed to the occupational positions they hold more generallyas posing some difficulty when assessing their contributions.

«This group is very sensitive to shocks, and it could be related to their presence in sectors where there's a lot