Vision of poverty in Paraguay based on its incidence, intensity and severity measures. 2019

• Main Author: Justo Manuel Camacho Guerreros
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Asunción 2020-11-01
• Series: Población y Desarrollo
• Subjects: -
• Online Access: http://scielo.iics.una.py/pdf/pdfce/v26n51/2076-054x-pdfce-26-51-1.pdf

Universidad Nacional de Asunción, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. San Lorenzo, Paraguay The United Nations (UN), through its official media, socializes a master plan known as the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the objective it pursues is to achieve a sustainable future for all; the first goal seeks to end poverty in all its forms, worldwide (UN, 2020). Poverty, with the passing of time, acquired different definitions, this probably was due to the di fficulty presented by the analysis of said term, on the one hand it seeks to indicate that situation where the person does not have sufficient resources to stay alive, this approach is used in studies of developing societies; and on the other, it aims to denote a situation where there is not enough to live a life according to what society considers normal, this approach being the one adopted in research on developed societies (Domínguez and Martín, 2006). The large number of people worldwide, approximately 783 million, who live on $ 1.90 a day cannot meet their minimum requirements for food consumption, because they are below the international poverty line, according to UN reports. (2020). In this sense, it is important to con ceptualize this social phenomenon, establishing categories such as: extreme, absolute and relative poverty. Extreme poverty, also known as the level of indigence, indicates those people who, according to the income they receive, are unable to satisfy their minimum nutritional require ments. Regarding absolute poverty, it delimits the aggregate of persons or households, whose income level is below a predefined level at least to survive. Finally, relative poverty defines the poverty limit in relation to a level of standard of living in society, allows identifying people whose standard of living is below the average (Vos, 1996). In Paraguay, data from 2019 reveal that 1,657 million people are in a situation of poverty, approxi mately 17.14% of this poor population lives in conditions of extreme poverty. In this sense, the extreme poverty line was determined by ₲ 266,754 for residents in urban areas and by 3 243,608 for people living in rural areas. According to López (2007), the desired attributes of a poverty measure, known as axioms, are: Replication, as the income distribution does not change, despite the change in the total popula tion, the poverty measure does not change. Monotonicity, indicates that the measure of poverty should increase when the income of a person who is part of the poor population is reduced. Decomposibility, refers to the possibility that the measure has of separating the components that make poverty by groups. Transfer, when a poor person makes a transfer of their income to another person with a higher income, whether they are poor or not, the measure of poverty should increase. Social welfare is when people with lower incomes are given more weight by the measure. Focus, as the income of the poor changes, the measure of poverty does not change. Within the previous context, poverty can be expressed through measures of incidence, intensity and severity, each of these measures presents a vision regarding the poor population. For this purpose, the percentage of the population that does not reach the level established as the poverty line is called the incidence or extent of poverty (University of the Basque Country, 2020); Despite the criticism received, because it does not comply with the axioms of monotonicity and transfer, it is one of the most used measures when looking for a first approximation to the magnitude of the social problem, this is due to the simplicity of its calculation and its easy interpretation (Uribe and Hernani, 2013). On the other hand, the intensity and severity of poverty are measures that help to understand the situation of the people who make up the population characterized as poor. The first, also known as depth of poverty, is a measure that indicates how poor the poor are; and the second measure shows the inequality that exists between the income of the poor; the latter is a measu re of well-being and is also called a measure of poverty inequality (DGEEC, 2020). In this sense, incidence makes it possible to calculate how many poor there are, the intensity of how poor they are and the severity of how income is distributed among the poor, thus allowing a broader perspective on the level of poverty of a population. According to data from the General Directorate of Survey Statistics of Paraguay (2020), in 2019, the incidence of poverty was 23.5%, indicating the percentage of the total population that lives below the national poverty line, The intensity of poverty, for the mentioned period, indicated that 32.1%, on average, of the value of the basic consumption basket could not be covered with the income received by poor people; and for its part, the severity of poverty was 3.5%, showing a slight reduction of 0.3 percentage points compared to the previous period, visualizing a slight improvement in this last indicator, considering that the higher the value of this , the greater the income inequality among the poor.