The economy minister and Finance (MEF) Lily Arbeleche was present this Tuesday in Parliament in the session of Deputies that gave final sanction to the Accountability Law project sent by the Executive Power to convey its support to the government coalition.
Arbeleche said she was “very satisfied” by the voting of the law by the coalition government, in addition to the PERIwhich leads the deputy Cesar Vega.
“We came to accompany because it seemed extremely important to us to convey support to the coalition caucus that voted for Accountability,” said the minister, who added that it is about a “milestone” and a “very good milestone” on the path laid out by the government. “There are many additional resources that the government adds to the National Budget voted in the first year of government,” he recalled.
The head of the MEF specified that these incremental resources from public spending “are not thrown without thinking where they go” and that these funds will be allocated to areas that have been considered “the most important” such as security, education, infrastructure, social policies and the recovery of the real salary of public workers.
“We are not in love with numbers. What we look at are people and we seek the well-being of Uruguayans,” said Arbeleche.
The minister said that within the pending in a longer-term view is the reform of the pension system, whose bill is expected to be signed by the Council of Ministers this Thursday so that it can then be dealt with by Parliament.
poverty data
consulted by the last poverty data for the first half of 2022, The Minister of Economy considered that it is “very difficult” to draw a conclusion from semi-annual data because they have a margin of “significant error”.
The The total poverty rate increased in the first half of the year, according to the INE. According to the official report, poverty was estimated at 10.7%, with a half percentage point increase (about 17 thousand more people) compared to the same period last year (10.2%). That meant that for every 1,000 people there were 107 who did not exceed the minimum income to cover their basic food and non-food needs that are considered for measurement.
In the average of last year (2021), poverty had been estimated at 10.6% and had been reduced by 1 point compared to 2020 (11.6%). This implied that some 35,000 people left their condition of poor under the income methodology.
Arbeleche considered that the important thing to attack this problem is to have “a good diagnosis” for the design of public policies. He announced that in the next few days data from the INE regarding food safety will be known.
The head of the MEF indicated that it is necessary to work on support to reverse the current numbers and also on the structural through the policies carried out by Mides. “Those resources will be from the economic team,” he assured. Arbeleche indicated that the government is working to create more jobs and thus lift more people out of poverty.
The director of the OPP, Isaac Alfie, had declared to radio Carve that from the technical point of view it is not possible to speak of a fall or rise in poverty in general terms in Uruguay because the variations that have occurred in recent semesters are within the margin of error (+/- 0.9%) and that they must wait for more data to see if a clear trend consolidates.
Asked about the child poverty rate, the director of the OPP recalled that the government has made a “number of monetary and non-monetary transfers” to those most vulnerable sectors of the population. “What is certain is that (child poverty) did not improve in any case despite the monetary transfers; I do not have an explanatory answer for that. We have thought and we do not have it,” said Alfie.
The director of the OPP considered that perhaps those monetary transfers should be “focused” more on families or people who really need it. “These are issues that are being studied by Mides, which is the one in charge of these policies. The resources that have been allocated are very important,” he assured.
And the data for the first semester —disclosed by the INE— showed that poverty in children under 6 years old rose from 16.1% in January-June 2021 to 22.5% in the same period this year and reached the same level as the first half of the pandemic (2020). In turn, it was 6 points above the level that had been registered in the same period of 2019 (16.4%).
