During the first half of 2024, the majority of Argentines were living in poverty, with the rate sitting at a vast 52.9 percent.
However, following Milei’s reforms, including austerity, devaluing the peso, and cutting federal expenditure to reduce the nation’s huge fiscal deficit, the figure now sits at 38.1 percent, a reduction of 14.8 percent.
“These figures reflect the failure of past policies, which plunged millions of Argentines into precarious conditions,” President Javier Milei’s office said following the release of the INDEC report.
“The path of economic freedom and fiscal responsibility is the way to reduce poverty in the long term.”
The reduction marks a boost for Milei ahead of midterm elections due to take place this year.
His free-market-friendly policies won over investors, but it has taken time for the effects to be felt in the wider economy, sparking protests over a cost-of-living crisis in the South American country.
The tumbling poverty rate was helped by inflation drastically falling from just below 300 percent in May last year to under 70 percent now.
In a post on social media platform X, Milei celebrated the news.
“Poverty has fallen sharply. The drop in inflation, the growth in the level of activity, and the policies promoted by the Ministry of Human Capital have lifted more than 8 million people out of poverty. Considering the peak figures, the number of poor people has dropped by more than 10 million,” he wrote.
“The good Argentines are enjoying it, while the eco-no-chant BANDS, the club of serial devaluators, the miserable politicians, and the self-important/ignorant journalists (from those who perceive themselves as the right-thinking center—unconvinced leftists—to the most rancid left).”
Despite the reduction, around 11.3 million of Argentina’s 47 million population still live in poverty, INDEC said, with 2.5 million of those in what is classed as “severe poverty,” meaning they lack the income to cover the cost of a basic food basket.
Some Argentines have said that despite the drop in the headline figure, they still felt economic pain, with some having to scavenge on thrown-away food to get by or taking informal low-salary jobs.
“There are more and more people rummaging through dumpsters here, foraging,” said Jorge Silvero, a resident of the Buenos Aires suburb of Tapiales.
“People coming to look and take a small bag of bagallo (smuggled goods), as we say, some vegetables home. They have enough to eat, at least to take home. But there is a terrible hunger.”
“Now we have price stability, or at least macroeconomic stability and much lower inflation,” said Agustin Salvia, director of the Argentina Social Debt Observatory at the Catholic University of Argentina.
However, he cautioned that income levels for workers, retirees, and pensioners remained below what they were at the end of 2023 and that many people were taking on “more precarious, subsistence jobs, and informal work.”
“There is a big gap between what the statistics say and what you feel on the streets,” said Tomás Raffo, an economist at Argentina’s largest public sector workers union, CTA, which has opposed many of Milei’s policies.
“We suffered a very strong blow where a lot more people went into poverty, and now some of them have come out. ... But those who were poor before all this have gotten even poorer.”
