Poverty rose 41.7 percent in the second half of 2023, affecting around 19.5 million people when extrapolated out to the whole population, data published by the INDEC national statistics bureau has revealed.
This is an increase of 1.6 percentage points compared to the first half of the year and 2.5 percentage points higher than a year earlier.
Furthermore, 11.9 percent of Argentina's population, some 3.5 million people, are living in extreme poverty, said the government agency – a rise of 2.6 points from the first half of the year.
At a regional level, there was an increase of poverty and destitution everywhere. The most affected area was Greater Buenos Aires, where the poverty rate reached 45.5 percent.
The percentage of households falling below the poverty line reached 31.8 percent. That set features 8.7 percent of homes in extreme poverty, including 11.9 percent of people.
Basic needs
INDEC considers poor people to be those who do not earn enough to cover the Total Basic Food Basket, a set of food and non-food needs that are considered essential. It registers as destitute those who do not even cover the Basic Food Basket, that is to say, those who cannot buy the minimum necessary to meet their nutritional needs.
The number of children aged 0 to 14 living in poverty reached 58.4 percent, which means that in the entire country there are 6.5 million children at least considered to be poor. That’s half a million higher than a year earlier and 750,000 higher than when former president Alberto Fernández took office in 2019.
The impoverishment of the population continued despite a greater number of price controls and social plans, new pension moratoriums, a delayed exchange rate and fully subsidised public services.
This came in addition to significant money-printing to artificially maintain consumption. All of that did not manage to prevent the fall of income of workers amid runaway inflation which ended up trebling in the last year of the last government (211.4 percent).
By late 2022, a study by the UCA and UBA universities calculated that this new phenomenon reached 27.3 percent of those in work.
That study also indicated that those in work in households receiving social benefits went from 3.8 percent in 2003 to 19.3 percent in 2022. This is another sign of the adjustment increasingly affecting income.
In 2023, salaries had a bad year. Public workers reflected a real fall of 20.2 percent; private workers experienced a 14.7-percent fall, and informal workers, 31 percent.
Unemployment dropped by 5.7 percent. However, the jobs that were created are precarious, and its composition changed: it advanced for public workers and freelancers, but the formal private-sector market has remained stagnant since 2011.
Deterioration
The deterioration of the economy and rise of inflation, which eroded the purchasing power of salaries throughout last year, has caused poverty numbers to increase.
A year ago, 39.2 percent of people were considered poor in Argentina and 8.1 percent destitute. Six months ago, those figures had already escalated to 40.1 percent and 9.3 percent. Ultimately, the rise of extreme poverty was quicker: from one year to the next, poverty grew by 2.5 percentage points, and destitution by 3.8 points.
The worsening of social indicators has come in parallel to favourable numbers in unemployment percentages, which accounts for the fact that the phenomenon is explained more by the plunge in the purchasing power of salaries and pensions.
Inflation closed out 2023 at 211.4 percent, the highest year-to-year figure in three decades, and now surpasses 270 percent over the last 12 months.
The report by the statistics bureau showed that the last snapshot of 2023 revealed that in the 31 urban centres contemplated by the official measurement, some 12.3 million lived in poverty condition and 3.5 million in destitution. When making a projection from that sample of urban centres to the entire population, the number of people affected goes up to 19.4 million and 5.5 million.
Some private estimations already started giving numbers to that assumption of higher numbers of poverty and destitution in early 2024.
The Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA), via its Social Debt Observatory, estimated that poverty in Argentina had reached 57.4 percent of the population in January. That 57.4 percent is the highest level in the series, since 2002, when it had reached 54 percent and projected to the entire country it is some 27 million poor, seven million of which are destitute.
The Milei government’s December devaluation of the peso, in addition to the elimination of official programmes, implied a dive in the average remuneration of the private sector (29 percent) – its worst one in 29 years.
– TIMES/AFP/NA
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