A leading poverty expert in Argentina has warned against premature celebrations after the release of official data confirmed a dramatic fall in poverty during 2024.
Figures released by the INDEC national statistics bureau published Monday revealed that 38.1 percent of the population was considered poor in the second half of last year – a steep decline from the 52.9 percent recorded in the preceding six months.
President Javier Milei hailed those figures in a post on social media. “Poverty fell very sharply. The drop in inflation, the growth in the level of activity and the policies promoted by the Human Capital Ministry have lifted more than eight million people out of poverty,” said the La Libertad Avanza leader in a post on X.
Yet Agustín Salvia, the director of the widely respected Observatorio de la Deuda Social poverty watchdog of the Universidad Católica Argentina (Social Debt Observatory of the Catholic University of Argentina, UCA), said that beyond the headline figure, there remains serious cause for concern.
“Behind the improvements in poverty statistics there is not much to celebrate,” said Salvia, whose department won acclaim for consistently tracking poverty throughout the 2000s, when government data became unreliable.
"If we compare the third quarter between the two years, we are almost even, with 38.2 percent in the third quarter of 2024 versus 39.2 percent in the third quarter of 2023,” he said.
“Nothing significantly changed if we consider the level of employment and the real value of wages and salaries. On average, they are very similar to the situation in the third quarter of 2023," said Salvia, whose observatory tracks poverty on a multi-dimensional basis, rather than just a monetary value, as INDEC does.
For Salvia, the “only effective solution to structural poverty and the impoverishment of the middle classes is to boost investment and employment in small and medium-sized enterprises.”
He added: “This requires a greater supply of goods and services for the domestic market and for export, with more technology and productivity, and, of course, better wages in real terms.”
The UCA academic noted a recovery in incomes since the first quarter of 2024, when the devaluation of the peso and President Milei’s austerity cuts had severely impacted Argentines’ pockets.
However, "this recovery took place for those who had – and did not lose – a formal job in the private sector, with respect to the sharp drop they had in the first quarter of 2024,” said the expert. “This is not the situation for public employees – [who are earning] 10 percent lower in real terms – or for employees in precarious situations. Nor did formal employment increase, which remains almost the same or below 2023 depending on the period considered."
Salvia also observed that “households see their current consumption capacity reduced,” which he said “is not faithfully reflected in poverty statistics.”
He added: “That is why we say that behind the improvements in poverty statistics there is not much to celebrate.”
For the poverty expert, “the situation is stable, the social variables have not exploded, but neither are there significant improvements compared to how bad we were.”
“It is true that it could have been worse, and as I said, macroeconomic stability is an asset that we must take care of, especially given the fact that we are still going through a systemic economic crisis from which it is not so easy to get out of just by lowering inflation," Salvia said.
– TIMES/PERFIL
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