The income from transfers of social, monetary or in-kind programs represent an important source of the total current per capita income of households in Mexico, which is why CONEVAL proposes the scenario where households would not have received this support.
When carrying out these exercises for 2018, it was observed that the percentage of the population in a situation of poverty goes from 41.9% to 43.8% without the support, so the number of people in a situation would go from 51.9 to 54.2 million people in 2018 and from 46.8 to 50.3 million Mexicans if they did not receive the support of social programs in 2022.
“According to the information we have in the inventory of CONEVAL’s social programs, at the cutoff of 2023 we have a little more than 11,000 interventions or social programs at the three levels of government in our country, the vast majority obviously has to do with social programs At the municipal level we also have a significant percentage for the state”, explained José Nabor Cruz, president of Coneval.
He stressed that at the federal government level there are 121 social programs, and that all of them were a factor that influenced the reduction of the population in poverty that was seen between 2020 and 2022.
According to Coneval, in 2022 the largest share of income from transfers was from social programs in the first five deciles of income, while from the sixth decile it was income from retirement and pensions.
The average monthly income per person from social programs went from 309.96 pesos to 422.17 from 2018 to 2020, while for 2022 it was 508.38 pesos at August 2022 prices.
The head of Coneval highlighted that the results of this exercise show that the weight of transfers from social programs in the total per capita current income and the variation in the average amount of these, account for a greater incidence in the percentage of the population living in poverty and extreme poverty in 2022 compared to 2018.