Publications

This is the first update produced by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography on the measurement of labor poverty, following the 2024 and 2025 reforms that led to the dissolution of Coneval, the former body in charge of this task.

Poverty stood at 31.8% in 2024, down from 34.6% in 2023 – a reduction of 2.8 percentage points. This means 1.3 million people exited poverty between 2023 and 2024. Overall, between 2012 and 2024, poverty decreased by 9.2 pp, falling from 41% to 31.8%.

In a context of extinction of the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development (Coneval), as the agency in charge of measuring poverty among other evaluation activities, this note presents some of the results of labor poverty as of the third quarter of 2024 published last December 3.

Poverty in LATAM represents a complex and diverse challenge. On average, monetary poverty affects 37% of the population in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. A Multidimensional Poverty Index constructed for these countries identifies key deprivations linked to health coverage, economic dependency, and education.

In the 2024-I quarter, on average, the population in labor poverty was able to cover only 42.3% of the food basket with their labor income. In Baja California, Guerrero and Oaxaca, people in labor poverty can purchase less than 1/3 of the food basket.

The labor poverty indicator in Mexico was 35.8% during the first quarter of 2024, reaching its lowest level in nearly 17 years, specifically, since the third quarter of 2007, when it was 35.2%.

Coneval updated its quarterly calculation of the proportion of the population that is in labor poverty. In the third quarter of 2023, the proportion of the population in labor poverty, at the national level and in the urban areas, did not improve compared to the proportion that existed before the pandemic emergency began.

37.8% of the population in Mexico was in a situation of working poverty as of the second quarter of 2023, that is, close to 49.6 million people in the country were not capable of covering the cost of the food basket with their labor income.