Focus on economics as election season kicks off in Chile.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
The release of Chile's latest poverty statistics sparked a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty economic debate between the leading political blocs, which are scrambling to score points ahead of nationwide municipal elections on Oct. 23, and presidential and parliamentary contests in November 2017. But while the competing claims might serve short-term political agendas, they do little, it appears, to address the country's ongoing confidence in leadership problems.
The numbers, reported Sept. 22 by the Ministerio de Desarrollo Social (Ministry of Social Development), suggest that between 2013 and 2015, the percentage of Chileans living below the poverty line (as calculated by income alone) dropped 2.7 points, from 14.4% to 11.7%. The ministry, as part of its biennial Caracterizacion Socioeconomica Nacional (National Socioeconomic Characterization, CASEN) survey, also measured what it calls "multidimensional" poverty, an approach that takes into account factors such as housing conditions, access to education and healthcare, security, and social cohesion. By those standards, the poverty level dropped from 20.4% in 2013 to 19.1%.
As modest as it may be, the poverty dip came as welcome news for the administration of President Michelle Bachelet, who has struggled with paltry approval numbers following allegations, first made public in February 2015, implicating her son in a multi-million-dollar real estate and influence-peddling scandal (NotiSur, April 24, 2015). Support for the president has slipped even more in the wake of recent protests against the country's mostly privatized pension system (NotiSur, Aug. 12, 2016). In August, the Centro de Estudios Publicos (Center for Public Studies, CEP), Chile's most prestigious polling firm, measured Bachelet's approval rate at just 15%, the lowest mark for any president since the country's return to democracy in 1990 (NotiSur, Sept. 9, 2016).
The president and her allies, eager for anything to blow a bit of momentum in their sagging political sails, hail the poverty dip as evidence that the administration's approach--however unpopular it may be--is working. The numbers are all the more encouraging, they say, given how poorly the economy as a whole has performed of late. In 2014, the year Bachelet returned to power, the economy grew just 1.9%, down from 4% in 2013, according to the World Bank. The growth rate improved slightly in 2015, inching up to 2.1%, but is likely to slip again, to 1.75% this year...
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