First modification:
In our new Enlace program, in its Southern Cone edition, we go to Buenos Aires to understand why Argentina, once one of the richest countries in Latin America, cannot reduce poverty beyond 20%. We also review the figures to explore why, despite the fact that all governments faced it, the problem not only persists but has been growing in recent years.
According to the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC), poverty in Argentina stood at 40.6% in the first half of 2021. Other official figures indicate that more than 10% are below the poverty line, which implies that they cannot access even the basic food basket.
Drawing a timeline of poverty in Argentina implies crossing data from various sources applied with different methodologies, something that some specialists have done and which allows establishing certain estimates.
About 40 years ago, with the arrival of democracy, poverty was around 22% and although in the following years it fell, the hyperinflation of 1989 made it rise again and it soared even more with the crisis of 2001-2002 . Since 2003 there was a sustained decline again until 2013, although the quality of the official figures between 2007 and 2015 is seriously questioned. In any case, since 2013 poverty, with ups and downs, has been increasing and now it has increased even more with the Covid-19 pandemic.
The issue of poverty is not new in the country. Historically, Argentina was considered –in the Latin American context– as a nation with a significant middle class. It is still ranked 46th out of 160 on the United Nations Human Development Index today, but even so, the country fails to control poverty. That is why fighting it has been a promise, a challenge, for all governments since then. But none of them managed to solve the problem in a sustainable way.
“Basically, in the last 70 years, the country went through 15 economic crises and each one of them left a higher poverty floor. And perhaps this is the reason why in the last decades the country was never able to drill, in the In the case of childhood and adolescence, a poverty floor of 30%, a little lower in the general population. With which, poverty in Argentina is, it could be argued, the unresolved situation of decades of poor economic performance along with with serious distributional problems “, affirms Sebastián Waisgrais, specialist in Social Inclusion at Unicef Argentina.
.