Mexico, Honduras, Argentina and Colombia are the four countries with the most poor people in the region, according to a statistical table published this Tuesday in the Social Panorama 2024 of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
According to these data, during the government of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico made significant progress in combating poverty, which was reduced by 6.9 points and stood at 28.6% in 2022, a higher percentage than the regional average, which is 27.3%.
According to ECLAC statistics in the Social Panorama 2024, Mexico is the fourth country with the most poor people in Latin America, as only Honduras, Colombia and Argentina have higher rates of this indicator, with 56%, 32.7% and 30.1%, respectively.
Nine other Latin American countries have lower percentages of their population living in poverty.
Among them, Uruguay stands out, with only 4.5% poverty, followed by Chile (8.1%) and Panama (14.3%).
These are estimates by ECLAC for 2022 – like those for Mexico and Chile – and for 2023 for the rest of the countries.
In terms of extreme poverty, Uruguay is also the country in the region with the lowest incidence, with 0.2%, followed by Chile, with 2.1%.
In Mexico, extreme poverty is at 6.2%.
These are estimates by ECLAC itself, which, in the case of Mexico, differ from those published by the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval), which estimated that in 2022 poverty rose to 36.3% and extreme poverty to 7.1%.
According to ECLAC’s Social Panorama 2024, the percentage of the Latin American population living in poverty in 2023 was 27.3%, 1.5 percentage points lower than the previous year and the lowest in the region since records began.
Source: proceso
