According to the latest update from the World Bank, poverty in Peru, at the end of 2022, covered 32.2% of compatriots, while 39.4% of Peruvians were located in the line of vulnerability. The first indicator remains above three points compared to 2019 and the second above two points, also in reference to the pre-pandemic period.
The recent monetary poverty data, published by the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI) in May 2023, reported monetary poverty that reached 27.5% of Peruvians. This meant an increase of 1.6% when compared to 2021 (25.9%) and 7.3% compared to what was registered in 2019, the INEI stated.
The differences between one measurement and another originate in the methodology, explained Carolina Trivelli, former Minister of Development and Social Inclusion. She detailed that the world Bank It makes an average poverty line for all countries and calculates the per capita amount of daily consumption and that differs with the Peruvian poverty line.
“The Peruvian poverty line is based on Peruvian prices. These standardized lines, which are average lines used by the bank, allow the World Bank to make comparable poverty estimates between countries., but with that amount you buy a different basic basket of products in Peru, Panama, Uruguay, Senegal and Ukraine, but the bank uses a single line to put all countries in front of a common reference. Therefore, the national line is more precise than the one used by the World Bank. It is not a worrying difference, quite the opposite. It is simply a reference,” Trivelli noted.
In the year 2022, according to the INEI, 9 million 184,000 people would have been affected by poverty, increasing by 628,000 people compared to the previous year. On the other hand, 5.0% of the population was in extreme poverty; That is, 1 million 673,000 Peruvians had a level of per capita spending lower than the cost of the basic food basket (S/226 in that year).
On the other hand, in the year 2022, the extreme poverty It reached 5.0% of the country’s population and increased by 0.9 points compared to 2021; while, when compared to 2019, it was higher by 2.1 percentage points.
Poverty was higher in the rural area (14.6%), than in the urban area (2.6%), registering increases of 2.5 and 0.5 points, compared to 2021.
It is important to emphasize that the poverty line for the year 2022 was the monetary equivalent to the cost of a basic food and non-food consumption basket, which for this period was S/415 per month per inhabitant, that is, for a family of four members, this amount amounts to S/1,660 per month.
According to World Bank data, in the regional scenario Peru and Paraguay are the only ones that have not recovered their pre-pandemic poverty levels. In the case of Chile, it has a poverty rate of 4.7% and in Uruguay it is 6.4%.
Source: Larepublica
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