FOOD PRICES PRESS THE INFLATION INDEX / web
The year of record inflation in three decades did not result in a marked increase in the rate of poverty and indigence in households, because, according to experts, the recovery of jobs acted as a mitigation, although it was mostly dealt with of precarious and low-paid jobs, which made it possible to rebuild the income of the most vulnerable families to some extent.
In any case, the generalized loss of purchasing power of wages caused the trend of a slight increase in poverty rates to be sustained.
The latest data on the value of the Total Basic Basket (CBT) prepared monthly by INDEC, corresponding to December, registered a rise of 4.5% and closed with an end-to-end increase in 2022 of 100.3%, that is 5.5 percentage points above the 94.8% marked by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) throughout the year.
Both the total basket and the food basket are defining so that the State has on the radar the reality of the most sensitive social indicators, such as poverty and indigence. This happens because the first is taken as a parameter to determine the indigence threshold, and the second, which includes basic expenses on clothing, health, transportation or education, determines the so-called “poverty line,” according to Infobae.
In other words, households with incomes below the CBT are those that are considered poor. In the same way, the food basket -which has a limited scope to basic necessities- is the one that configures the “line of indigence”: those families that do not manage to cover the necessary income to acquire the CBA.
With the latest data from December, the Government will prepare the poverty estimate for the second semester of 2022, which INDEC will release next March. As a reference, according to the latest official data, poverty was 36.5% of the population at the end of the first half of that year, while indigence reached 8.8% of the inhabitants. In this way, just over 17 million inhabitants are considered “poor” (including the “indigent”) because they cannot cover the cost of the total basic food basket with their income.
PRICES AND WORK
The experts consulted believe that the record rise in prices in 2022, which was the highest in three decades, would have had a more pronounced impact on social indicators if it were not for the fact that there was a “compensating effect” due to the improvement -albeit partial- of the labor market, which had the most favorable numbers throughout 2022 also in three decades but with a notable advance in precariousness.
For Leopoldo Tornarolli, an economist at the Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (Cedlas), of the University of La Plata, and who carries out a measurement through mobile semesters, explained in dialogue with Infobae that the trend that was seen in the last two quarters, which he identified as poverty growth “will continue.” “I expect a number close to 40%, possibly something above,” he estimated.
His method of mobile semesters -that is, taking into account, for example, the April-September section as a sampling prior to the traditional January-June and July-December that INDEC does- already showed that for that period poverty was two points higher than that of the previous period, that is, 38.5% versus 36.5% reported by the official statistical agency.
“Although inflation slowed down a bit in the last 2 months, it had had a very strong jump in October, particularly in the values of the basic food basket and the total, which implies that at the end of the year the baskets grew by more than 6 percentage points above inflation”, pointed out Tornarolli.
In this sense, the director of the Social Debt Observatory of the Argentine Catholic University (UCA), Agustín Salvia, considered that “the data from the observatory showed that poverty did not change significantly, it increased slightly as a result of inflation but compensated with the increase of work in the poorest homes,” he said.
