Mexico’s impoverished masses were up to 33.6 percent richer last year than the previous year, according to Mexican statistics.
However, the change owes less to a sudden increase in actual wealth and wellbeing for the country’s poor people than to unannounced changes in the methodology for measuring household earnings.
The changes make comparing poverty rates from one year to the next impossible — something acknowledged by the Mexican National Geography and Statistics Institute (Inegi).
However, the tweak will allow image-conscious politicians to claim success in their anti-poverty programs and economic stewardship, even though public discontent over stagnant wages and rising prices remains widespread.
“Basically what the Inegi is saying is: We’ve been overestimating poverty levels,” said Jonathan Heath, an independent economist in Mexico City.
“The way that they did this” — without public consultation — “raises suspicion,” he said.
“The new poverty numbers are certainly going to fall by a significant amount and it’s not due to improvements, it’s not due to government action, it’s not due to anything. It’s due to the way Inegi has carried out this survey,” he said.
The methodological changes were revealed on Friday last week with the release of last year’s edition of the Survey of Socioeconomic Conditions, which showed an overall real increase of 11.9 percent in household earnings.
In some states, the increase was more than 30 percent, while the poorest Mexicans saw the biggest gain in earnings, according to Inegi.
The changes came as a complete surprise to social scientists and non-governmental groups, but were justified by Inegi as an attempt at obtaining a truer measure of poverty — a notoriously tricky undertaking, as people tend to underreport their income.
Inegi said in a statement that it applied new criteria in the collection and review of field data, which allows it to “offer society and the state a more precise measure of household earnings.”
Measuring poverty has proved controversial in Mexico, where social programs are criticized as vote-buying exercises and beneficiaries in some states are told erroneously that their benefits are conditional on supporting the party in power.
Mexico used to measure poverty based on income, but changed its methodology in 2008 to take a “multidimensional” measure based on six social necessities, Heath said.
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