As long as we're on Argentina...

in a previous post, i commented that, despite argentina's double digit economic growth in the last quarter, "the folks i know in buenos aires are still struggling... inflation is taking a toll (roughly 10-12% projected for 2005) and rising employment, while encouraging, hasn't reached them yet..." this buenos aires herald editorial lends some weight to my anecdotal perspective...

The announcement [see previous post] that some 600,000 people have been pulled out of poverty is not as good news as it might sound — especially when measured against roaring growth reaching double digits in the previous quarter. The achievement (whittling the percentage below the poverty line down from 40.2 to 38.5 percent or some 14.7 million people) seems more impressive when measured against the peak level of 57.5 percent below the poverty line in late 2002, reducing that figure by a third. But even bringing down the ranks of the impoverished below the 15-million mark, it is still far too high above the 1999 level of 27 percent.

There is a relatively simple explanation why runaway growth has not made a bigger dent in poverty — inflation, which notoriously punishes low-income families the hardest, has slowed the rate of recovery. In Greater Buenos Aires, far from sharing the modest nationwide improvement, poverty has actually grown — from 44.4 to 45.1 percent (well above the national average) or some five million people.

let's add some perspective... greater buenos aires has a population of roughly 11 million and 5 million of them are still living in poverty... for a country that boasted the largest middle class of any latin american country prior to 2001, that's a very painful number...

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