In a new commission review, with data still from 2020, Mexico ranks as the poorest country in the region just behind Venezuela.

Mexico is currently the second country with the highest level of poverty in Latin America , as updated by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) . However, there are some variants that could influence the data, for example, that the measurement of poverty in the Mexican territory has not been updated, that is, the comparison is made with data from 2020.

However, it is well known that the COVID-19 pandemic drastically affected the Mexican population, especially economically and in employment. Last August, the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval) revealed that Mexico added 3.8 million new poor in 2020 due to the crisis derived from the pandemic , raising the figure to 55.7 million compared to 51.9 million in 2018.

The percentage of the population living in poverty grew to 43.9% in 2020 compared to the proportion of 41.9% in 2018, in the latest measurement by Coneval, the body in charge of official poverty data in Mexico.

The country also added 2.1 million people in extreme poverty for a total of 10.8 million. This represents a proportion of 8.5% of the population and an increase of 1.5 percentage points compared to 2018, when there were 8.7 million Mexicans in this situation.

In February of this year, Coneval estimated an increase of between 8.9 and 9.8 million Mexicans with an income below the Income Poverty Line due to the COVID-19 crisis.

According to the recent ECLAC report, in the last year the extreme poverty rate would have reached 12.5% ​​and the poverty rate 33.7% on average throughout the region. According to the agency, the economic transfers made by different governments during the worst moment of the pandemic prevented those rates from being even worse.

“Other countries in the region experienced strong increasing trends as a result of the pandemic, but this effect could be stabilized by the lower restrictions of the pandemic,” the report indicates. “Emergency transfers to the most vulnerable sectors made it possible to mitigate the rise in poverty in the region in 2020 (it went from 189 million in 2019 to 209 million, which could have been 230 million; in the case of extreme poverty, it went from 70 million in 2019 to 78 million, which could have been 98 million) ”.

Likewise, ECLAC indicated that these transfers “benefited 326 million people, 49.4% of the population. However, inequality in income distribution increased (2.9% of the Gini index). Meanwhile, moderate or severe food insecurity reached 40.4% of the population in 2020, 6.5 percentage points more than in 2019. This means that there were 44 million more people in moderate or severe food insecurity in the region and 21 million became seriously food insecure ”.

The body headed by Alicia Bárcena reviewed the policies that some of the countries in the region carried out to mitigate the impact of the pandemic.

The projections of the agency that depends on the United Nations showed that “if governments discontinue the emergency transfers implemented in 2020, the resources available to households would come mainly from labor income, heavily hit that year, and continuous social protection programs, previously implemented ”.

For this reason, family income will be insufficient “to offset the loss of income derived from the discontinuation of emergency aid programs.” In this scenario, extreme poverty could reach 14.8% (2.3 percentage points more than in 2020) and poverty would rise to 35.2% (1.5 percentage points more than in 2020), Cepal projected.

Few countries have made an official update of their poverty numbers so far this year. Most of the countries in the region still have data for 2020. Of course, it should be noted that each country has its own poverty measurement methodology, so it is not possible to make a linear comparison between the official statistics of each case.

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