During 2022, especially in the last quarter, there was a leap among the poor living in the city of Buenos Aires: it went from 6% to 7.7%, i.e. from 186,000 to 237,000 people.
At the same time there was a rescue of the middle class (from 49.9% to 47.2%) due to the increase in vulnerable and medium-fragile sectors. Meanwhile, it has gone from 33% to 33.8% (233,500) of children and adolescents (0-17 years) residing in families in poverty.
Thus, “within the group of families and people in situations of poverty, those who are in an extreme situation (indigence) increase.coming to represent 32% of families and 35% of people with an income deficit”, according to data for the fourth quarter of 2022 from the Statistics and Census Directorate of Buenos Aires.
These Buenos Aires figures can be a advance of what INDEC has to report at national level next Thursday March 30th.
If we add to the data on poverty (680,000 people) those of the vulnerable sectors (385,000) -so qualified because with incomes close to the poverty line- and of the medium-fragile sectors (344,000) in total 1,409,000 people (45.7% of the total) with various types of economic hardship.
Despite the increase in activity and employment, these indicators of homelessness, vulnerable groups and the middle class are more adverse than those of the same period of 2019, before the start of the pandemic. Indigence increased from 6.5% to 7.7%, poverty remained almost unchanged (22.3 against 22.1%), fragile and weak sectors increased from 19.5% to 23.6% and the middle class shrank from 48.6% to 47.2%.
Based on these data, the Buenos Aires Report states that compared to 2019 (pre-pandemic) “the greater weight of families in a situation of vulnerability and of the fragile medium sector jumps, with the parallel decrease of the wealthy and medium segments. At the same time, with such levels of poverty, poverty becomes more important. This translates into a simultaneous deterioration of the living conditions of the highest and lowest income groups”.
The Buenos Aires Report highlights that some groups are more affected by poverty than others:
* Families headed by women (where the incidence of poverty is 19.7%, against 14.3% with male heads), an unemployed person (almost two and a half times higher than the incidence on the total), or a woman employed in domestic service (41.2%).
* Families located in the southern area (33.1%) and those with children under 14 (27.7%), the latter with incidences of poverty and indigence increasing with the number of children in the house.
* Per capita household income of households in poverty is $13,426 and that of those in poverty who are not in poverty is $33,240. On average, $46,918 would need to be transferred to each family in poverty to get them out of poverty. This income gap represents, again on average, 38.2% of the total basic basket, says the Report
Source: Clarin
