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Argentina’s poverty has dropped to 38.1% in Libertarian President Javier Milei’s first year in office, the country’s official statistics agency reported on Monday, a closely folders that reflect the government’s progress that was among the world’s largest inflation rates.
The decrease in poverty for the second half of 2024 of July to December is an improvement of the 41.7% that Milei’s left-wing populist predecessors delivered for the second half of 2023. Milei hurled after office late that year with a mandate to stop the economic decline in the country by borrowing years of billless.
“These figures reflect the failure of the past policy, which plunged millions of Argentine into unsafe conditions,” said Milei’s office, while the government statistics agency, known as Indec, released its report. “The way of economic freedom and fiscal responsibility is the way to reduce poverty in the long run.”
But economists warn that the figure does not capture the reality of ordinary people struggling to cope with the most radical austerity program in the recent history of Argentina. Milei’s blizzard of cruel cuts has hit everything, from soup kitchens and bus father to apartment rent and healthcare, which erodes people’s purchasing power.
“There is a big gap between what the statistics say and what you feel on the street,” says Tomás Raffo, an economist at Argentina’s largest workers’ union in the public sector. “We have had a very strong blow where many more people went in poverty, and now some of them have come out. … but those who were poor before it all became more poorer. ‘
In the first half of 2024 – the first six months of Milei’s presidency – Indec reported that Argentina’s poverty had risen to 53%. On Monday, Indec reported that poverty had dropped by 14.8 percentage points to just over 38%for the previous six months, an effect on the rapidly declining inflation.
The annual inflation dropped to 66.9% last month compared to 276.2% a year earlier, according to indec.
“Politically, this is a very important achievement for the government, especially in this year of the midterm election,” said Camilo Tiscornia, director of C&T asesores Económicos, a consultant in Buenos Aires, and notes that it was the lowest poverty since the first half of 2022. “It shows that what the government is doing starts to work.”
The bright picture can be difficult to find out on the streets of Buenos Aires, where a growing number of Argentines tries to survive by exploiting dumpsters to take care of and fall at their wares at traffic lights. This month, the capital was shaken by violent clashes between police and protesters demanding higher pensions.
“I see a lot more people selling things and sleeping in the street,” said Lorena Jiménez, a 46-year-old stickers who sell with two of her nine children on Monday. She and her children have a former home cleaner who lost her job last year, and now sleeps the most evenings on the streets and uses the $ 160 they receive each month – part of a recently increased government determination to support poor children – to occasionally pay hotel accommodation.
Questions about the rosy statistics have been in a country where administrations have been caught official data for political ways in the past. After a major scandal, Indec underwent a long -standing review before regaining credibility in 2016.
“For me, this low inflation and poverty are a lie,” says Viviana Suarez, a 48-year insurance agent in Buenos Aires. “How does it make sense if you go to the supermarket and see the prices and realize that you can buy no food that is not for sale?”
A growing number of experts expressed concern that, although it is perfectly orthodox, the inflation measurement of Insed became misleading, partly because the consumer price index is based on a basket of basic goods from 2004. The government applies the inflation numbers to calculate the poverty.
“It’s very outdated and gives little weight to the things with prices that have risen most recently,” says Raffo, the economist at CTA.
According to CTA researchers, there are food accounts for a smaller part of the average household’s budget today than it did two decades ago. The index does not take into account digital subscriptions and other key expenses that have changed over time.
It also misses how critical private services such as healthcare and education have become more expensive since Milei has held office, and how residents pay more for rent in a recently deregulated housing market, Raffo said.
He added: “Indec catches very little of what really happens in the economy.”
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