Pandemic generated 22 million new poor in Latin America – ECLAC Report

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The pandemic has pushed 22 million people below the poverty line over 2020 in the region’s countries, according to data from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Thus, 209 million people are considered poor and, of this total, 78 million are indigent. Latin America was one of the territories most affected by the health crisis, and all nations experienced increases in their indices.

On Wednesday, Argentina announced that the final poverty figure for last year stood at 42%, an increase of 6.5 percentage points over the previous year. Indigence climbed to 10.5%. This is one of the first official data known among the region’s countries on the impact of the coronavirus on this social indicator. Among other countries with high increases in the poverty index were Ecuador (7.4%), Mexico (7%), and Peru (5.8%).

According to the statistics institute, other countries that have already published their official statistics were Uruguay, which showed an increase to a total of 11.6%. This would imply almost 100,000 people falling into poverty, totaling 409,586 people in that situation.

For Uruguay, it represents the third consecutive year in which total poverty increases: from 7.9% in 2017 to 8.1% in 2018, to 8.8% in 2019, and 11.6% in 2020. With this last figure, the country had its highest figure since 2013, when it stood at 11.5%.

Paraguay assessed that as a consequence of the health crisis, 26.9% of its inhabitants are below the poverty line, while a year earlier, that number was 23.5%. In a population of some 7 million inhabitants, 26.9% translates into around 1.9 million people living with per capita income below the basic consumption basket price in 2020, which includes food and basic services.

Ecuador recorded a jump from 25% to 32.4%, affecting 5.6 million people. Meanwhile, 14.9% of Ecuadorians were living in extreme poverty in December. That meant an increase of 6 percentage points between 2019 and 2020 in this indicator.

Each country has its own methodology for measuring poverty, so it is impossible to make a linear comparison between the official statistics of each case.

A few days ago, the International Monetary Fund estimated the variation of poverty in Peru in the framework of the Article IV report. In this report, the IMF calculated that this index’s increase was from 21.7% to 27.5%.

Meanwhile, again with no official figures for the moment, Mexico could have had an increase from 49% to 56%, according to a study carried out by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

According to these percentages measured by the University Program for Development Studies (PUED), 6.5 million people would have been added to extreme poverty and 9 million to poverty.

Source: Infobae