Around 12.5 million people in Argentina are now poor, according to new calculations from UCA and Di Tella universities; High inflation in first six months of year and inability of wages to keep pace with wage hikes means further one million people have slipped below the poverty line.
According to specialist estimates, Argentina ended the first half of the year at a poverty rate of between 42 and 43 percent.
This would imply that a further one million people have slipped below the poverty line since the most recent official figure published by the government. Back in March, the INDEC national statistics bureau reported that 39 percent of Argentines living in the country’s 31 largest urban areas, some 11.5 million people, were classified as poor in the second half of 2022.
"The increase in the year-on-year poverty rate seems to be mainly explained by an increase in total household income that is considerably lower than the increase in the value of the total basic food basket. That is, the increase in the total basic food basket between the second half of 2022 and the first half of 2023 exceeded 70 percent, while total household income increased by less than 50 percent," Martín González Rozada, director of the master’s programme in Econometrics at the Torcuato Di Tella University (UTDT), explained in an interview with Perfil.
Data from the university registered a poverty rate of 43 percent in the first half of the year. In the country’s inland region, the rate stood at 40.3 percent in the first quarter of the year, rising to 45.5 percent in the second quarter. That would be the highest rate since the first three months of 2006, when 44.5 percent of the nation lived below the poverty line.
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