Poverty in Argentina would close 2022 down but without recovering pre-pandemic levels

The poverty rate in Argentina would close 2022 down but remain above the levels recorded during 2019, that is, before the pandemic and before Alberto Fernández took office as President of the Nation.

That is what a private study indicates, which assures that the country will only “cut back” the deterioration registered due to the arrival of the coronavirus health crisis.

The report, prepared by the Center for Concertation and Development, the Workers’ Statistics Institute (IET), and the Metropolitan University for Education and Work, considered that “in the best scenario, 2022 would end with a poverty rate that will be 0.2 points above the one registered in 2019″.

The analysis stated that 2019, the last of Mauricio Macri’s term of office (2015-2019), was a year in which the proportion of the population below the poverty line had increased by 7.8 points compared to 2017, going from 27.7% to 35.5%.

It implied that only “the deterioration that occurred after the pandemic would be cut back,” the survey maintained.

However, it highlighted that “all scenarios show a reduction in the poverty rate, basically because the projections of economic agents assume that the economy will grow”.

“This would allow cutting the deterioration associated with the pandemic, but does not allow discounting the advance of poverty that occurred during 2018 and 2019″, he expressed.

THE EVOLUTION OF INCOME IN ARGENTINA

According to the study, all strata lost purchasing power between the second half of 2017 and the second half of 2021.

In turn, he estimated that between the last two semesters, the second of 2021 and October and March 2022, all partially recomposed the real income capacity.

He also considered a “notorious dispersion between average incomes per stratum, although the range is narrowing” because, between July and December 2017, the high stratum could buy 8.2 times what the low stratum could buy.

That ratio went, between October 2021 and last March, to 7.5.

With information from Bloomberg