A dramatic reality: poverty would be 54% without social assistance and would affect almost 25 million Argentines

Ismael Bermudez

05/05/2021 23:55

• Clarín.com

• Economy

Updated 05/06/2021 8:27 AM

Without

monetary

aid

, such as the IFE, AUH and other State transfers, the levels of indigence in 2020 instead of affecting 10% of the population would have reached 27% and the percentage of poverty would have been almost 54% in instead of 44.7%.

Out of a total population of 45.4 million, there

would be almost 24.5 million poor people.

However, “the massive nature of social assistance

was not enough

to prevent the socioeconomic situation from continuing to deteriorate.

This points to the limitations faced by social policies in Argentina to

revert in a lasting way the deterioration

of living conditions ”.

v 1.5

Impact of social policies

Immediate effect of social policy income on poverty

Source

Observatory of Social Debt of the UCA

Infographic:

Clarín

These are the relevant data referring to the incidence of Social Programs in the Study "Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Well-being in Urban Argentina" of the Social Observatory of the UCA.

The Study indicates that in the “context of

prolonged socio-economic deterioration

, as a result of the stagnation and retraction of the demand for employment and remuneration for work, towards the year 2019, more than 3 out of 10 households in Argentina received

some type of social program ”

.

In 2020, “said value expressed another significant jump with the pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis, it became overcrowded among households in 2020 (47.3%) and

reached more than half of the population in that same year (55.4%). %) "

.

Among the poor population, aid reached 79.7%.

"The Universal Allowance Per Child, permanent income policy for households with minors, and temporary cash inflows, corresponding to the

Emergency Family Income (IFE)

provide the bulk of social programs during the last wave," explains the Report.

The Study warns that “the

exceptional nature

of various assistance programs, the continuity of which was tied to the evolution of the healthcare context, implies that

the upward trend in healthcare policy could be reversed in the short term

, although within very significant levels as long as the The demand for employment does not expand in a sustained manner or the

need to reimpose restrictions on mobility

affects the sources of labor income of the population, particularly linked to

the informal sector

”.

The statistical series show the

upward path taken by social assistance

in integrated working and marginal working class households and also in the middle class:

* In 2019, around 42.7% and 59.1% of households of registered and unregistered workers, respectively, received some social program.

In 2020, it increased both among integrated working-class households (59.6%) and marginal (77.3%).

* Due to the general increase in social assistance during the context of isolation,

almost 3 out of 10 non-professional middle class households (29%) were reached by some program

.

In the same sense, although to a much lesser extent, there is a slight increase in social assistance in professional middle-class households (6.7%).

* This critical scenario is

more accentuated in the interior of the country

than in the City of Buenos Aires, although the levels of indigence and poverty are very high in the South of CABA and in Greater Buenos Aires.

Agustín Salvia,

director of the Observatory, told

Clarín

that “in our opinion, the most important impact of the transfers received by households was recorded

on extreme poverty and on food.

In 2019, the indigence rate, instead of 8.4%, would have been 16% without the transfers at that time.

During 2020, with additional programs, homelessness instead of 9.8% would have been 27.7% ".

"In the same sense," he adds, "

for the population of the Alimentar card, indigence would not have been 12% but higher than 20%

. This without counting direct food assistance: at least 4 million people received food reinforcements through of viands or dining rooms, public or social ”.

Salvia added that “however, as before,

nothing was enough

.

Without a health emergency,

the food problem was already serious

long before this crisis.

This is fundamentally associated with the fact that

poor households require more and more public assistance

as informal jobs are lost or deteriorate and wages lag behind the inflation that affects basic products and services ”.

In conclusion, the Study says that “within the perspective adopted in this research, it

is considered necessary to expand the policies of income transfers and direct food assistance

to solve short-term and immediate problems in the most vulnerable households.

However, it is pertinent to remember that they

do not solve long-term structural problems

, for which

other types

of state interventions

are required

on the economic structure and the social fabric ”.

NE

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