MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Multi dimensional poverty conditions affect 25 million Argentines, 54,9% of the population

The last report to be released refers to the first half of last year, with 44,6% of the Argentines in a multidimensional poverty situation, which represents 35,9% of households

Some 25 million Argentines, 54,9% of the whole population can be described as poor, following monetary criteria and simultaneously a multi-dimensional approach. This approach refers to such structural factors as housing, basic services, education, employment, and health attention.

The info was collected by the Social Policies Coordination Council, which depends from the Argentine presidency Office and is currently under the management of Paula Amaya.

“With the purpose of arriving at a multidimensional poverty index, based on rights, several indicators have been chosen which include the following dimensions, housing, habitat, basic services, employment and social and health protection. According to the official methodology, a house hold can be considered poor, from a multidimensional point of view, if it lacks two of the above mentioned dimensions.

In other words, ”the alternative measure of poverty takes into account the precariousness of housing materials, overcrowding, insecurity over housing ownership, deficient sanitary conditions, location of the abode in a vulnerable zone”

The indicator also takes into account, non attendance to an education establishment within the mandatory age, school lagging of children, insufficient educational achievement, plus difficulties to access a paid job, job precariousness for workers, deficit in social services coverage for adults and absence of coverage both for employment and health care.

The Council of Social Policies has pointed out that it does not replace the traditional poverty monetary index provided by the Argentine Stats Office, Indec, but rather it is a complementary indicator which looks to establish causes and extent of poverty so that the State can design different public policies from those that only take into account the monetary situation.

The last report to be released refers to the first half of last year, with 44,6% of the Argentines in a multidimensional poverty situation, which represents 35,9% of households, according to the Standing Household Poll.

And since the current index does not take into account the momentary side, the additional integrated method was added, which allows to interweave monetary poverty with multidimensional poverty. This method in the first half of 2021 shows that 54,9% of the Argentine population (44,6%) of households have at least two poverty situations, monetary and non monetary, while 29,9% have both (22,2%). This is how the number of 25 million Argentines in multi dimensional poverty is reached. Anyhow this methodology is relatively new and does not have sufficient previous reports to establish clear tendencies.

The last official Indec monetary model showed that 37,3% of the the population in Argentina, some 17,4 million, is considered poor, and 8,2% live in indigence. These percentages refer to the second half of 2021, so that main social indicators showed an improvement compared to the 42% poverty of 2020 and 40,6% of the first half of last year.

In other words both poverty and indigence underwent a minor contraction which can be explained by the strong economic recovery during last year, some 10,1%, accompanied by a rebound in employment.

But this is only a partial relief since almost half of Argentine families live from the so called black economy and non registered jobs.