The national urban poverty rate plummeted from 52.9% to 38.1% in six months, while extreme poverty halved to 8.2%, marking the sharpest decline in decades.
President Javier Milei’s administration achieved this while slashing public spending by 5% of GDP and navigating a 1.7% economic contraction in 2024. Key drivers included targeted welfare programs and inflation control.
The government expanded the Universal Child Allowance (AUH) to cover teens up to age 17 and increased food card coverage, directly aiding vulnerable households.
So they cut spending overall, but expanded their Universal Child Allowance. I mean, that right there is probably what did most of the poverty reduction. The article doesn’t really say where the spending cuts came from. Could be they just cut a lot of waste, but it could be they’ve made cuts to important government services, and the effects haven’t necessarily been felt yet.
The IMF projects 5.5% GDP growth for 2025, fueled by rebounding consumption and investment. This turnaround challenges conventional wisdom that austerity inevitably harms vulnerable populations, showing market-oriented policies can coexist with poverty reduction when paired with precise safety nets.
Does it? Again, we don’t know what’s been cut and we don’t know what the long term effects of those cuts will be. All we know is that they made significant cuts overall, while also expanding two specific safety net programs. Admittedly, that has resulted in a significant reduction in the urban poverty and extreme poverty rates, for now, which is undoubtedly a good thing, but only time will tell if those will last.
This reads like neoliberal propaganda, but honestly Javier Milei is right of even most neoliberals. I seriously doubt the expansion of the Universal Child Allowance and the increased food card coverage will last. I’m certain Milei will want to cut those programs, at some point. He is anarchocapitalist adjacent, so I’m sure he wants to get as close as possible to no government spending at all, eventually.
here be not positive stuff
Milei has halted most public infrastructure works, helping improve the state’s finances on paper but battering construction activity, which plunged 42% in March, according to official data. At least 50,000 construction workers lost their jobs between November and February, with industry bodies saying it could now be closer to 100,000.
So like most conservative governments, they are breaking the piggybank to make things look good while they are there, and will leave the next government with crumbling and neglected civil infrastructure to contend with.
i share your skepticism and distrust of milei as well. Time will be the true test of his policies. It’s just that i was expecting an unmitigated disaster from day one, and so far …
OP’s post history full of economic news about Argentina, but zero mention of the IMF loans they just gave them. You can only guess why?
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Thank you, I know now that I live rent free in your head and all but caring so much as to research me and make a nickname is another level of commitment
I didn’t knew you felt that way but I wouldn’t cyber with you, just being upfront
LOL
That’s not what I’ve read elsewhere. There’s been a massive spike in poverty in Argentina since he took office. Something is funny with these numbers.
That is amazing news, especially since the stats come from UNICEF. I am not a Milei admirer, but i gotta respect his results so far. If he manages to turn the country around without hurting the vulnerable (and that seems to be the case according to the article), i will have to rethink my opinion.
Yeah, I can’t argue with numbers - although when I searched for more of those numbers (because there was no report linked in the article), I am at least somewhat sceptical as of now. Mostly because all the outlets I have seen report on it are… well, not really neutral. This site, too, has a weird amount of AI images and praise of Trump (e.g. like in this article).
So, I had a bit of a look around, and as expected - if only one side reports something, there is usually at least something missing:
For example:
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/expert-reports-say-argentinas-poverty-rate-has-fallen-to-368.phtmlMeanwhile the ODSA (Observatorio de la Deuda Social Argentina) poverty watchdog of the UCA Catholic University voiced that although the projected indices had reached similar levels to the previous year for the third quarter of 2024, the consumer capacity of households was reduced by the higher costs of basic services such as electricity, water, gas and transport, among others.
Unlike the line traced by the total shopping-basket, the measurement of multidimensional poverty does not only focus on family earnings but also the lack of access to basic sources of welfare in from one to six dimensions.
“The current panorama shows an aggravation of the situation in this sense - multidimensional poverty (measured as income plus one lack) increased inter-annually from 39.8 to 41.6 percent and within that figure structural poverty (three wants or more) also rose from 22.4 to 23.9 percent,” they alerted.
This is a massive reduction, but it is a reduction from a massive surge:
So - seems like there is at least some cherry-picking and reporting early projections as fully manifested facts going on here, but the recovery itself is still good news for the people actually living there, of course. I’d like to wait for more fully-fledged analysis reported by different outlets than this. How likely is this to be sustainable? How many additional factors will be at play? Even if Milei’s reforms turn out to be a miracle of a new way to “do austerity right” - I will only believe that if there is better analysis than this, because Libertarian-adjacent outlets praising this, sometimes with misrepresenting data, like, e.g. this graph I came across:
(Milei came to power at the end of 2023, as a reminder, so the graph is coloured in a deliberately misleading way)
Those kind of reporting sadly does not spark confidence for me.
Good analysis, and good on ya for looking into the data! Thanks.
Milei gets compared to the populist right in other countries a lot (Trump, Orban, etc) but he’s really a more old school libertarian. In a country as rife with corruption and financial mismanagement as Argentina, it seems like a bit of libertarianism was what they needed
