A report from the Social Debt Observatory of the Argentine Catholic University (UCA) reveals that in 2022 the poverty rate reached 43.1%, affecting 17 million people; while the indigence rate stands at 8.1%. The work highlights that poverty increased 15 percentage points in the last decade.
The UCA highlighted that the current social assistance that is provided by the three levels of the State prevents poverty from reaching 50% and the indigence rate from reaching 20%. The survey also shows that the segment of the poor was fed by sectors of classes of workers from the middle and popular sectors.
In this regard, he pointed out that if the inflation rate dropped to one digit, the poverty rate could fall between 10 and 15 points. 40% of the households in which 50% of the population live have received some type of official assistance or complementary program. The UCA clarified thatand “neither economic liberalization nor social assistance policies are enough to promote a balanced development model”,
“The general trend shows that in 2022 households and the population of urban Argentina did not experience significant improvements in access to well-being compared to 2010. This last figure implies that at least 13 million Argentines suffer from severe exclusion in access to goods and social inclusion services”, stated the job.
The UCA held 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”. Also, he pointed out that “The composition of the economically active population during the period 2010-2022, it is evident that not only the productive system is highly heterogeneous, but also the social structure of work”.
“The participation of the sum of unemployment and unstable underemployment have been rising almost uninterruptedly, reaching 32% of the economically active population this year”, added. Against this background, he remarked that, if “In addition to regular but precarious jobs (28%), the sum of employment problems reaches 60% of the workforce, equivalent to 12 million workers.”
From this scenario it is concluded that “only 40% of the economically active population has a decent or dignified job, be it through salaried or non-salaried employment”. For the UCA “this strong labor segmentation is closely linked to chronic poverty and its increase over more than a decade.”
The report noted that “in poor households, less than 2 out of 10 workers manage to access full employment, while in non-poor households, although in decline, more than 5 out of 10 workers achieve it. Although due to inflation the phenomenon of poor workers in a general way as of 2018, in the micro-informal sectors and the social economy, their impoverishment is prior and begins in 2012”.
The work stressed that, from the 2018-2019 crisis, deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic (more than 31% if the unemployed are considered), the poverty of workers settled in a new structural level: 29, 8% “A peculiarity of the current economic cycle (post-pandemic) is that significant employment growth coexists, but labor income does not recover,” concluded.
Source: Argentine Social Debt Observatory (UCA)