The workers’ inflation reached 9.1% in Mayaccelerating by 1.1 points over that of April, while year-on-year it exceeds 115%, driven by a significant price rise regulated by the government.
This is indicated by the latest report from the Institute of Workers Statistics (IET) of the Metropolitan University for Education and Work (UMET) and the Center for Concertation and Development (CCD).
“This month’s increase is due to a significant rise in prices regulated by the Government, particularly in public services. This leads us to think that measures can be taken to compensate,” said the general director of the CCD and former Minister of Education of the Nation, Nicolás Trotta.
The report warns that it is the highest value in terms of inflation for registered workers since April 2002when it exceeded 10% after the inflationary jump derived from the exit of Convertibility”.
EIT analysts warned that “inflation reached 42% in the first five months of the year, a figure that if annualized for the rest of the year becomes 132%. Meanwhile, interannual inflation (that is, against the same month of the previous year) reached 115.7% and showed the sixteenth consecutive acceleration”.
The report states that “inflation in May was once again driven by Housing (+23%), driven by increases of 54% in electricity and 27% in gas as a result of the reduction in subsidies implemented by the national government. Added to this rents, which rose 8.4 percent”.
Food inflation slows down
On the other hand, it stands out slowdown in food growth. In this sense, it indicates “the rest of the items rose below the general level, although all rose above 6%, something that had not been seen since February 1991, prior to the Convertibility Plan. Food and beverages slowed down and they scored 6.8%”.
For the EIT coordinator, Fabian Amico, “the reduction in food inflation, which went from growing more or less 10% last month to an increase of 6.8%is related to dealing with two issues related to international prices, that is, the rate of increase in the prices of the products that Argentina exports and imports, but fundamentally of those that it exports, because Argentina exports food”.
“There was a fall in international food prices and when these values fall, a deflationary effect is caused on internal prices, in relative terms, which means that prices grow less. In turn, the wholesale exchange rate that is the one that translates international prices to the domestic market was relatively stagnant. Therefore, these two factors slowed down food inflation in the domestic market,” he added.
Informal employment rose to 34.2% in the last quarter of 2017
salaried employment
In the second part, a reference is made to the composition of employment in the last 20 years and it is noted that since 2015 registered wage earners have been losing ground.
“After having gone from 37.6% to 51.8% between 2003 and 2015, registered salaried employment has been losing weight within the total employed population. In 2022 it accounted for 46.4% of the total, a figure similar to that of 2007-8. In contrast, self-employment (particularly female) and unregistered salaried employment have been gaining weight,” he warned.
Also, the work pays particular attention to a segment of unregistered salaried employment that has not been analyzed so far: “That of workers in a dependency relationship.”
“This segment has been gaining participation in the total number of unregistered wage earners: they went from 8% to 14% of the total of this universe between 2016 and 2022. The striking fact is that they are mostly highly qualified wage earners, with income levels and poverty are much more similar to registered wage earners than to the rest of the informal ones. Here, for example, doctors who bill an employer or even a part of the workers of platforms such as transport and courier services, “he said.
Source: Ambito
