The poverty rate will remain stable in Latin America in 2023, affecting around 183 million people, representing a stagnation in the results of the reduction of this indicator against the background of general weak economic growth, ECLAC announced on Thursday.
This year, 29.1% of Latin Americans will experience poverty. Of them, 11.4% – equivalent to 72 million people – will fall into the “extreme poverty” category, or the population unable to meet their basic daily nutritional needs, a report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) predicted. ).
The numbers are similar to those of 2022, when poverty fell to 29% of the Latin American population and extreme poverty reached 11.2%, returning to levels similar to 2019 before the pandemic.
“Poverty figures in 2022 (NDLR, on which the forecast for 2023 is based) are similar to those at the beginning and end of the last decade, showing that insufficient progress is being made at the regional level to achieve the goal of its eradication,” ECLAC warned while presenting the report “Social Panorama of Latin America and the Caribbean 2023” at a press conference.
The situation is even less encouraging when it comes to extreme poverty, with the latest figures exceeding those from 12 years ago by more than 20 million people, the organization added.
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Latin America’s expected GDP growth rate of 1.7% in 2023 – significantly lower than the 3.8% in 2022 and which could even reach 1.5% in 2024 – does not foresee an improvement in poverty in the region.
“Given the low economic growth, poverty and extreme poverty figures at the regional level are expected to remain virtually unchanged,” said ECLAC Secretary General José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs.
According to ECLAC, social inequality in the region also remains at a very high level.
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In Latin America, “the top (population) decile receives 21 times higher income than the bottom income decile, which is responsible for very high inequality. The concentration of wealth is even greater than that of income; in 2021, the wealth of “The 105 billionaires (indlr, people with assets of more than $ 1 billion) in the region represented almost 4% of the wealth of the entire population, exceeding the values of 2019 and 2020”, warns the report.
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