World Bank: a third of Peruvians were poor in 2022

According to the last update in March 2024, the World Bank declared that poverty in our country reached 32.2% and the vulnerability line was 39.4%. In that sense, approximately 7 out of every 10 Peruvians found themselves in a situation of poverty or vulnerability. This reveals that until now both levels remain above pre-pandemic figures, with poverty and vulnerability remaining above three and two percentage points respectively compared to 2019.

The 2020 health crisis caused a 30.1% increase in poverty. However, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI), in 2022 there was a recovery in monetary poverty, decreasing to 27.5%. What does this comprise? According to the monetary approach, people who reside in households whose per capita spending is insufficient to acquire a basic basket of food and non-food (housing, clothing, education, health, transportation, among others) are considered poor.

Javier Herrera, IRD researcher, points out that the difference between the figures published by the World Bank and the INEI would lie in the fact that the latter makes a verification of what happened based on real data: “What I see is that the World Bank is using a poverty line that is not the official poverty line in Peru and that is for reasons of international comparability. They set a poverty line value in purchasing parity power to United States dollars, to compare different countries,” he adds.

Along the same lines, Carolina Trivelli, researcher at the Institute of Peruvian Studies and former Minister of Development and Social Inclusion of Peru, explains that the World Bank makes an average poverty line for all countries in order to calculate the per capita amount of consumption. daily and that differs with the Peruvian poverty line: “The Peruvian poverty line is based on Peruvian prices. These standardized lines allow the World Bank to compare poverty between countries, but with that amount you buy a different basic basket of products in Peru, in Panama, in Uruguay, in Senegal and in Ukraine,” she adds.

However, despite the fact that the INEI figure showed some recovery in monetary poverty, the Peruvian economy fell 0.55% in 2023 compared to 2022. The governing body of the national statistics and information systems also points out that In 2022 there were 9 million 184,000 people affected by poverty, increasing by 628,000 compared to the previous year. On the other hand, one million 673,000 Peruvians were in extreme poverty. Monetary poverty affected 41.1% of the rural population and 24.1% of the urban population.

“Anemia rates on par with poverty”

The INEI Demographic and Family Health Survey (ENDES) shows that, at the national level, 43.1% of children between 6 and 35 months of age suffered from anemia in 2023. The highest levels of anemia continue to occur in the rural area with 50.3% In Puno, for example, 7 out of 10 children suffered from anemia.

The results of the evolution of monetary poverty for 2023 would be published by the INEI next month. However, the outlook does not seem to be encouraging. The National Foresight Observatory points out that experts affirm that the monetary poverty rate in Peru in 2023 could have increased by up to 33%.