Is there less poverty at Milei? Agustín Salvia answers

In an interview with the Modo Fontevecchia program, Agustín Salvia, sociologist and director of the Argentine Observatory of Social Debt, warned that the recent decline in income poverty “does not reflect social reality.”

One has the feeling that Argentinians are poorer overall. Argentina’s poorest sector can improve without this meaning that at the same time society as a whole, or the majority of what used to be called the middle class, deteriorates and becomes poorer: the overall population is poorer, although there are fewer poor people. Salvia explains it in his own words: “Economic disadvantages are always disadvantages in relation to a certain parameter, and the parameter is relative, related to the level of economic, social, cultural and even moral development of a society. Therefore, the parameters can change depending on historical contexts and also on the methodology, because it depends on what kind of theoretical-methodological approach one chooses to measure these disadvantages.”

Salvia continues: “Some will think that the parameter is at the level of material and economic livelihood to go to work the next day, and others will think that they are at a higher threshold that has to do with how they develop their human capabilities. This means that poverty has different conceptual theoretical definitions and is not only relative to the historical, moral and cultural time of society. So, theories in the debate behind it, policies and social and economic actors in debate and time. I am not saying that, to do philosophy of science around that.” It’s not about the term “poverty”, but about the complexity that it has when the term has these multiple meanings and therefore there are even experts working on concepts from different approaches and politicians arguing about policies with different paradigms in the background.

So the relevant question is: what to do? “You can take income poverty,” answers Salvia, “as it is officially measured by Indec in Argentina, and income poverty means monetary deprivation in relation to a theoretical basic basket of food that should be covered in order not to be poor and destitute, or in comparison to an entire basic basket containing food and multiplying the value of this food basket by a non-food component. It is called the Engel coefficient, which allows us to capture everything that a typical Middle class family used for non-food consumption It doesn’t matter what they are used for.” because they spend, it doesn’t matter whether they actually consume food or not, or what they do with that money. It is a theoretical parameter, therefore it is an indirect measure.

“This indirect measurement – continues Salvia – is based on the income and expenditure survey of the year 2004-2005. It is very old, 20 years have passed since this structure. Although the basic food basket was updated in 2016 when the Indec was restored, the coefficient was not updated in terms of the coefficient because we did not have an updated and reliable survey. This only happened between 17 and 18 and today we could have a basket, that better corresponds to the consumption pattern to use the reference in order to be able to measure and compare income with the supposed costs or the expenditure structure of the households. The first problem: We compare the culture, i.e. a basis, a poverty line that ages.

“The indicators of supermarket consumption or GDP consumption are not growing at the same rate. There is something that doesn’t match between what is measured with this approach and methodology and what is happening in reality. So what is happening? In reality, the economy has actually relatively stabilized.”