According to a new report from Social Debt Observatory of the Argentine Catholic University (UCA), about 17 million Argentines are poor and 8.5 million are indigent. In the work carried out by the institution, the poverty rate climbed to 43.1% during 2022and indigence reached 8.1%.
The new poor, according to the report, are “working classes of the middle and popular sectors, vulnerable to crises, lack of work and inflation. Meanwhile, the structurally poor manage to protect themselves by reproducing an informal subsistence economy, which does not lift them out of poverty, but at least alleviates it”.
The UCA stressed that in the last 10 years, poverty grew 15 percentage pointsand that in the event that the social assistance provided by the State did not exist, poverty would affect 50% of the population and indigence 20% of it.
Other information that emerges from the report is that 40% of the households where 50% of the population lives received some type of social assistance. One of the most alarming data from the study is that if to measure poverty the degree of access to health and food, education, housing, public services, work and a healthy habitat is measured, between 2010 and 2022, practically “70% of the population was affected by at least one of these fundamental rights.”
According to the Observatory’s evaluation, if Argentina managed to control inflation and place it at less than one digit, could reduce poverty between 10 and 15 percentage points. However, the UCA maintained that “it is not the increase in prices but the non-creation of new jobs, the deterioration of existing ones and the fall in wages, which generates imbalances.”
If these data are compared with the end of the government of Mauricio Macriwhen the UCA measurements showed that poverty in Argentina affected the 40.8% of people (with 8.9% homeless), a million Argentines They join that segment in the Alberto Fernández era: at the end of 2019, 16 million Argentines lived in poverty and 3.6 million in indigence.
The figure was alarming if one took into account that 59.5% of children and adolescents are included in poverty, with which there are some 7 million households in this age group punished. The levels of severe food insecurity registered in 2019 by the UCA also increased: they went from 7.9% in 2018 to 9.3% this year.
In 2022, the child poverty rate was 61.6% (8 million children) and the indigence rate was 13.1% (1.7 million children), The joint effects of transfers and direct food aid received by households with children (86.8%) were effective in reducing child food insecurity.
According to the 2022 UCA report, the sectors that suffered the most impact were the non-professional media or middle class (went from 14.6 to 18.2%) and the Buenos Aires suburbs It is where the highest level of poor population is concentrated (50.5%).
by RN
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