Without social assistance, homelessness rises to 20% and poverty to 50% of the population

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As pressure mounts in the ruling party and opposition to cut social plans during 2022, 40% of households in which 50% of the urban population live received some kind of social assistance.

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Without those programs or plugins, the poverty rate would have reached almost 20% of the population instead of 8%, and the poverty rate instead of 43% 50%, according to the Social Observatory Report of the Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) based on data from the third quarter of this year. those percentages they represent 21.5 million urban poor, of whom 8.5 million are said to be destitute.

UCA data shows that without social assistance, both destitution and poverty are at higher levels than in pre-pandemic years. According to the Report, “the impact of social income transfer programs in reducing poverty is higher than that highlighted in the pre-pandemic”.

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Meanwhile, “as expected, the “immediate” effect of income transfers on poverty is less than that recorded on poverty”.

Homelessness grew from 11.8% in 2017, rose to 11.3% in 2019 and is 19.6% in 2022. And total poverty of 32.4% in 2017, rose to 43.3% in 2019 and 50% in 2022.

Presenting the Report, Agustin Salvia, director of the Social Observatory, underlined that without social assistance “currently 43.1% of the urban population is poor in income and 8.1% indigent. In 10 years, poverty has grown by more than 15 percentage points: Who are these new poor? The working classes of the middle and popular sectors, vulnerable to crises, unemployment and inflation. Meanwhile, the structurally poor manage to protect themselves by reproducing a informal subsistence economywhich brings them out of poverty, but at least alleviates it”.

  • Salvia added: “Among the excluded sectors, informal jobs have multiplied, families making greater efforts and receiving permanent assistance lines from the State, which in turn give impetus to the so-called social subsistence economy”.

Other key figures from the Report include:

• The share of the sum of unemployment and unstable underemployment has increased almost continuously, reaching 32% of the economically active population this year. If we add regular but precarious jobs (28%), the sum of employment problems affects 60% of the workforce (12 million workers). So that only 40% of the economically active population has decent or decent work, whether employed or non-employed.

• In poor families, less than 2 out of 10 workers manage to access full employmentwhile in non-poor households, albeit declining, more than 5 out of 10 workers reach it. Although due to inflation, the phenomenon of the working poor has generally grown since 2018, in the micro-informal and social economy sectors, their depletion is anticipated, having started in 2012.

• The cycle of stagnation that began in 2013 has caused a increase in poverty among the employedwhich reached 18.1% after the stagnation and inflationary rise that began in 2016. Since the 2018-2019 crisis, aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic (more than 31% if we consider the unemployed), in-work poverty has settled at a new structural level: 29.8% in 2022.

• Currently, monetary and non-monetary poverty affects about 4 in 10 people: 17 million Argentines. The more structural margin concerns 2 out of 10: that is, 8.5 million Argentines. And although the current situation appears to be socially sustained thanks to one part of the economy keeping its productive forces active, while another struggles for its livelihood and has public assistance, the projectable future looms pitiful and harrowing, corrosive on a social and political level.

Source: Clarin

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