In the video: Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich present the plan to deal with rising prices in the economy (Walla system!)
Poverty rates increased by 0.8% during the year 2021 - this is according to the poverty report published this morning (Thursday) by the National Insurance.
This is the first increase after six years of a downward trend in poverty and inequality rates.
The year 2021 was characterized by an exit from the Corona crisis, with up to half of it paid support to the unemployed by the state.
According to the report, the cessation of payments from June led to an increase in poverty, but the rapid recovery of the economy and the rapid return to the labor market caused a moderate increase relative to the global crisis.
The data of the report shows that in 2021, 1.95 million poor people lived in Israel, including 853.8 thousand children and 212.4 thousand senior citizens, with the poverty line obtained according to half of the median net income per standard person, reaching NIS 2,849 per month this year.
Between 2020 and 2021, the poverty rate among families increased from 20.6% to 21.0%.
Among persons from 20.5% to 21.0%, and among children from 27.2% to 28.0%.
The highest increase in the poverty rate was recorded among senior citizens - from 16.4% in 2020 to 17.6% in 2021, this is due to the cessation of the special grants given in 2020 on the one hand and their little participation in the labor market on the other.
The poverty lines by family size for 2021 show that a single-person family needs, according to the calculation, NIS 3,561 per month to be above the poverty line, while a family of a couple with a child or an independent parent with two children needs an income of NIS 7,550 per month.
A family of a couple with two children will need an amount of approximately NIS 9,117 to be above the poverty line.
Poverty rates increased by 0.8% during 2021 (Photo: ShutterStock)
The findings of poverty in a geographical distribution show that the dimensions of poverty in the districts of Jerusalem, the North and the South are higher than the average.
The poverty rate of families reaches 36.7%, 23.6% and 24.6% respectively.
Conversely, in the districts of Tel Aviv and the center, the dimensions of poverty are much lower than the national average (14.5% and 15.7% respectively), in the district of Jerusalem and the city of Jerusalem, where the dimensions of poverty per capita are almost double those of the population as a whole.
In the poorest cities in Israel there is a clear ultra-Orthodox majority - Modi'in Illit, Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh Bnei Brak and Ashdod.
In an international comparison, Israel remains at one of the highest levels of poverty in developed countries (second from the top after Costa Rica in all the years measured for Israel - 2019-2021).
According to the findings, in the comparison of Israel between 2020 and 2021, there was an increase from 19.4% to 19.8% - so that in 2021 Israel is placed at the top of the ranking among the countries, with a gap of about 8 percentage points from the average in the OECD countries and a poverty rate of almost Double of it, this despite a relatively high level of aid given as an addition to the normal aid during the Corona period in 2020 and 2021.
The state of inequality in an international comparison is less extreme, but still relatively high.
More in Walla!
Netanyahu and Smotrich revealed the economic plan: "The measures will immediately reduce the monthly expenditure"
To the full article
The poverty report for 2021: the poorest cities (photo: image processing, Walla system)
The report also measured the respondents' subjective sense of poverty.
According to the initial survey data, 4.9% of respondents estimate that they are already living in poverty and another 24.1% are not poor but are at risk of poverty.
In total, about 29% of the respondents are at risk of poverty, compared to an objective poverty risk rate of 27.4%, which is about two percentage points less than the one calculated according to the subjective feeling.
The findings also show that women assess themselves as being at risk of poverty to a higher degree than men - and the gap between women and men in the subjective measurement exceeds the objective one, which also indicates higher poverty for women than men.
Another finding is that the senior citizen population has the highest proportion of those who are confident that they will not deteriorate into a state of poverty - about 30% of the senior citizen respondents estimated this, compared to about a quarter of the total population and less than 11% of the Arabs.
In general, it seems that the proportion of those who assess themselves at risk of poverty is higher in the subjective measurement.
The poverty report for 2021: giving up hobbies (photo: image processing, Walla system)
In the survey, the respondents were asked about the inability to finance expenses and forgo consumption and treatments due to financial difficulty - 26.4% answered that they were unable to cover household expenses, compared to 25.8% and 30.2% in the previous two years.
In recent years, there has been a decrease in the proportion of people who gave up a hot meal for economic reasons from 6.4% in 2019 to 5.4% in 2020 and to 5.2% in 2021.
The 2021 poverty report: Waiver of prescription drugs (Photo: Image processing, Walla system)
The poverty report for 2021: giving up a hot meal (photo: image processing, Walla system)
There was also a significant decrease in the percentage of respondents who gave up leisure activities and hobbies due to financial difficulties between 2020 and 2021 (from 30% to 27.5%).
On the other hand, in the health sector there was an increase in the rate of those giving up services: the rate of people who gave up prescription drugs due to economic conditions increased by one percentage point in 2021, after a slight decrease between 2019 and 2020.
The rate of people forgoing medical treatment also increased between the two years by 0.8 percentage points.
news
News in Israel
Society and welfare
Tags
poverty
Social Security
Cost of living