73.3%: the real number of Poverty in Argentina. Three quarters of Argentine society ’emerges in poverty’but we are still talking about a middle-class country,” CELAG posted on its X account.
“If we do not accept this diagnosis, that is, that Argentina today lives mostly in conditions of poverty, We will continue to insist on the mistake of proposing a political, social and economic project without anchoring in reality.”he added in the post.
CELAG reported that poverty in Argentina is at 73.3%
The director of CELAG and doctor in economics, Alfredo Serrano Mancilla, published in “X” a brief report on the current socioeconomic situation in Argentina in which he explains how they arrived at the figure in question. “There are many figures that corroborate this ‘Bad Living’ in these eight months of Milei’s government. And they all agree on the same thing: The middle class barely exists and the poor class is the majority“, he said.
Based on data from the Permanent Household Survey of the First Quarter of 2024 of INDECthe economist began by pointing out that the average income of Argentine families is very unrepresentative of social reality. “With such an unequal distribution, it is much more rigorous to analyze the value of the median than that of the mean. Why? Because there are hardly any Argentine households that have incomes close to the mean, and because the mean is not in the middle of the distribution but shifted to the right, as can be seen in graph 1. There is 68% below that ‘average value’ and 32% above it,” Indian.
Along these lines, the economist considered that the most pertinent thing then would be to “pay attention to the value of the median: 50% of Argentine households have a monthly per capita income below 198,000 pesos. This half of the country is poor. This half and a little more: poverty in Argentina affects 55% of society. But this number is insufficient to measure real poverty.because these types of measures ignore households with incomes very close to the threshold.”
CELAG report: “Three quarters of Argentine society ‘lives in poverty'”
He then explained why he believes that this figure does not allow us to measure the real scope. “If a household has 100 pesos more than the value of the total basic basket (CBT), just 100 pesos more, it would no longer be considered poor according to the usual calculations. However, would it be correct to say that a household with a per capita income of 222,332 pesos per month is poor, but a household with a per capita income of 222,352 pesos per month is not? “It’s not correct”, he replied.
Continuing with his analysis, Serrano Mancilla pointed out that these households cannot be included within the middle class threshold. “These households are ‘almost poor’: they are right on the edge, they are vulnerable, and they are in no way middle class. In graph 2, we see that there is 18.3% of ‘almost poor’ households that have incomes in the range of 1 to 1.5 CBT. In short, if we are really concerned about poverty, we should consider the sum of the two, the ‘poor’ plus the ‘almost poor’. That is: 73.3%,” he stated.
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“Three quarters of Argentine society ‘lives in poverty’, but we are still talking about a middle-class country,” the economist questioned and added: “If we do not accept this diagnosis, that is, that Argentina today lives mostly in conditions of poverty, we will continue to insist on the error of proposing a political, social and economic project without anchoring in reality. This would be the same as wanting to speak with an everyday life that does not exist. And thus it is impossible to be effective when it comes to ‘Doing Politics’,” he concluded.
Source: Ambito
