About 4.7 million people who were in the middle class in Latin America before the pandemic, fell into a stratum of vulnerability or poverty, reversing decades of social progress, revealed the World Bank (WB).
As a proportion of the region’s inhabitants, the middle class fell to 37.3%, from 38% that was in this economic segment, where they classify people who earn between 13 and 70 dollars per day of work.
In a round table, organized by the Center for Global Development, the vice president for the World Bank region, Felipe Jaramillo, said that the impact of the pandemic on the economic situation of the people is much more dramatic, if it is removed from the metric the positive effect of the social transfer program in Brazil.
“Without considering the effect of Brazil, there would be 12 million people in the region who ceased to belong to the middle class in 2020,” he warned.
During his participation, he took data from the World Bank report entitled “The slow rise and sudden fall of the middle class in Latin America”, to warn that as the countries of the region remain the epicenter of the pandemic, it is also focused on this latitude the highest health and economic cost of the world health situation.
At the same conference, the director for the Latin American initiative at the Center for Global Development, Liliana Rojas Suárez, explained that another negative impact of Covid-19 and the one it has had on the food supply chain is food insecurity , where the countries of South America are the most affected.
Mexico and low support
In a table presented at the conference, where detailed information on 17 countries in the region is observed, the case of Mexico is exposed, where the proportion of people who met this income level and who could therefore be recognized as middle class, also got smaller.
According to World Bank estimates, Mexico’s middle class went from integrating 30.6% of the total population in 2019, to 27.6% in 2020.
At the conference, the professor of Latin American economics at the University of Tulane, Nora Lustig, said that “the low support of the Mexican government for the population as well as the limited countercyclical effort, motivated Mexico to become the country where the poverty”.
“In Mexico a safety net was not deployed, nor support to the population nor a countercyclical policy to the strong shock that was received by the pandemic.”
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