Weekly Report - 24 May 2012 (WR-12-20)

COLOMBIA| New poverty figures released. On 17 May Colombia’s national statistics department (Dane) released a new report which found that Colombia’s poverty rate last year stood at 34.1% compared with 37.4% in 2010. According to Dane, while progress is still being made in reducing poverty in the country, the latest figures mean that 19.98m people (over a third of the country’s population of some 46m) are considered to be poor and indigent. Of these, 46.1% live in rural areas and 30.3% in urban areas. Dane director, Jorge Bustamante, explained that the department’s latest report was developed with a new methodology which uses a multidimensional poverty index which that has five dimensions using 15 different indicators, as developed by the UK’s University of Oxford. This was then adapted to Colombia by the national planning department (DNP). Using this new methodology, the DNP found that over the 2002-2010 period the number of people living below the poverty line dropped from 56% to 37.2%. Dane’s latest report found that last year 1.21m people were lifted out of poverty in 2011; but perhaps unsurprisingly 857,000 of them were in urban areas.  Focusing on income per capita figures, Dane also found that there is a stark difference between what is earned by people in urban areas and in rural areas. Colombia’s overall income per capita was put at US$266.85. However, per capita income in urban areas was US$315.67 compared with US$109.65 in rural areas. The inequality in the distribution of poverty in the country is probably one of the main factors that led the World Bank to identify Colombia as the second most unequal country in the region behind Haiti back in March.

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