20080526 – Gobierno Perú dice pobreza bajó a 39,3 pct en 2007

Por Teresa Céspedes

LIMA (Reuters) – La pobreza en Perú disminuyó el año pasado 5,2 puntos porcentuales para situarse en un 39,3 por ciento, debido al fuerte crecimiento económico, aunque aún persiste una gran desigualdad en algunas ciudades andinas frente a las ubicadas sobre la costa del país, dijo el Gobierno.

El Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática (INEI) dijo el lunes que la pobreza es menor frente al 44,5 por ciento del 2006 y al 48,7 por ciento del 2005, aunque aún afecta a un fuerte porcentaje de los 27,2 millones de habitantes del país.

La disminución marcha en línea con la meta del Gobierno del presidente Alan García, que apunta a reducir la pobreza a un 30 por ciento al término de su mandato en el 2011.

Las cifras fueron obtenidas con el apoyo técnico del Banco Mundial, del Instituto de Investigación para el Desarrollo IRD de Francia y organismos peruanos como el Banco Central de Reserva y el Ministerio de Economía.

“La pobreza en el país, durante el año 2007, disminuyó de 44,5 por ciento a 39,3 por ciento,” dijo el jefe del INEI, Renán Quispe, a periodistas.

Perú registra desde hace seis años un sólido crecimiento económico, debido principalmente a la expansión de los sectores vinculados a la demanda interna y el auge de sus exportaciones mineras.

“Hay un círculo virtuoso, la economía está creciendo y está empezando a generar empleos cada vez de mejor calidad, está llegando poco a poco a todas partes del país y eso es positivo,” dijo el director regional del Banco Mundial para Bolivia, Ecuador, Perú y Venezuela, Felipe Jaramillo.

“Creemos que esto está muy asociado a la gran inversión que se ha venido dando en los dos o tres años, el muy buen manejo económico, el mayor acceso a los mercados externos y algunos de los programas sociales del Gobierno,” agregó.

La economía peruana creció el año pasado un 8,99 por ciento, la tasa más alta desde 1994.

CONTRASTES

El INEI afirmó además que el porcentaje de personas en pobreza extrema -que no accede siquiera a una canasta mínima de alimentación- en Perú fue de un 13,7 por ciento el año pasado, menor que el 16,1 por ciento del 2006.

“La tasa de reducción de la pobreza me parece una fantasía, me parece inverosímil. A este paso, si reducimos cinco puntos por año, vamos a terminar en 20 por ciento en el 2011,” dijo el analista y ex jefe del INEI, Farid Matuk, en conversación telefónica con Reuters.

Pese a la reducción mostrada por el Gobierno de García, todavía existen algunas regiones andinas del país que viven en la pobreza.

El INEI informó que la pobreza en las zonas urbanas se redujo el año pasado a un 25,7 por ciento desde el 31,2 por ciento del 2006, mientras que en el área rural bajó a 64,6 por ciento desde el 69,3 por ciento del año previo.

“Al analizar la incidencia de la pobreza por áreas de residencia y regiones naturales, se constata que el promedio nacional oculta situaciones de contraste,” agregó Quispe.

Por regiones, la pobreza en la costa fue de 22,6 por ciento, mientras que en los poblados andinos el indicador fue de 60,1 por ciento. En la región amazónica, la pobreza alcanzó al 48,4 por ciento de los peruanos.

Mientras en Lima la pobreza afectó el año pasado a un 18,5 por ciento de su población, el panorama es radicalmente distinto en algunos poblados andinos.

En Huancavelica, ubicada a 445 kilómetros al sureste de Lima, la pobreza afecta a un 85,7 por ciento de la población.

En las ciudades andinas de Apurímac y Ayacucho, la pobreza llega a un 69,5 por ciento y 68,3 por ciento respectivamente, mientras que en Puno, en la zona del sureste y cerca de la frontera con Bolivia, la pobreza fue de un 67,2 por ciento.

El tamaño de la muestra para determinar el nivel de pobreza fue de unas 20.000 familias a nivel nacional.

20060328 – Peru’s economic trickle down proves elusive

By Robin Emmott

AYACUCHO, Peru (Reuters) – Business has rarely been slower at Marlene Quispe’s underwear shop in the central Andes as the only thing that the rows of socks and bras seem to attract nowadays is dust from the street outside.

As Peru’s economy is set to record its fifth consecutive year of strong growth in 2006 — a feat almost unheard of in the country’s cyclical boom and bust history — ordinary Peruvians say they are seeing little or no benefit, making the economy a central issue in the upcoming April 9 presidential elections.

“There’s no prosperity here and we want change,” Quispe said as she sorted through piles of bras. “A lot of people are tired of waiting for this trickle down,” Quispe said.

That view is echoed around Peru despite encouraging signs such as new shopping centers and restaurants in Lima as well as robust commerce in towns near the country’s gold and copper mines. Yet job growth has proven elusive in an economy that expanded 6.7 percent last year.

Much to the chagrin of business leaders, presidential front-runner Ollanta Humala says the only way to bring the benefits of this growth to ordinary Peruvians is to increase state control over the economy.

He has received strong support from the poor as a protest vote for the country’s traditional economic policies.

“The idea that there is a trickle-down effect to the poor from economic growth is just an invention by Mister President (Alejandro Toledo),” said Omar Quezada, president of the Ayacucho region in central Peru, where 35 percent of the population is illiterate.

“We haven’t seen a large public works project in this region in the past five years,” he added.

Toledo, who took office in 2001 promising jobs and a better life for the poor, has argued that it is only a matter of time before the benefits of economic growth are widespread.

But economists say that despite average gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 4.5 percent over the past 15 years, the work force is growing at 3 percent a year, meaning new graduates are barely being absorbed into the job market.

“Peru’s poverty levels have barely fallen, the new jobs on offer are low-skilled and all we’ve really achieved is stability,” said Elmer Cuba, chief economist at Lima-based consultant Macroconsult. “People are exasperated.”

OVERDEPENDENCE ON MINING?

Many Peruvians say their frustration is heightened by the fact that since 1990, successive governments have done just what foreign economists told them to — privatize, liberalize and open the economy up to foreign investment.

Peru’s problem is that its mining and export-based sectors are the drivers of growth and people outside of those industries are not benefiting from high international prices for commodities and precious metals.

“The economy is simply not broad-based enough,” said Javier Zuniga, head of Lima University postgraduate business school.

Although Peru’s powerful mining sector generates more than half the country’s exports and accounts for 6 percent of GDP, it employs less than 1 percent of the working population.

According to Farid Matuk, head of the government’s National Statistics Institute, around 14 times more investment is required to create one job in the mining sector than in manufacturing, where Peru has traditionally been weak.

Partly as a result, the jobless rate in Lima, home to almost a third of the population, was 9 percent in February, or almost 1 percentage point higher than a low in Toledo’s government of 8 percent in October 2002.

Even that figure fails to take into account that half of Peru’s 13 million working population is underemployed, or not working the hours they want to, forcing them into lower-paid positions below their qualifications.

The solution that candidates pledge is red-hot growth over the next five-year presidential period and big job creation.

PROMISES OF FAST GROWTH

Most ambitiously, center-right lawyer Lourdes Flores, who is in second place in the polls, has promised GDP growth of at least 7 percent a year and 650,000 new jobs annually.

But center-left former President Alan Garcia, who is third in the polls, says meeting such goals are impossible.

“You would need to grow almost 14 percent a year to create 650,000 jobs annually,” said Enrique Cornejo, an aide to Garcia.

Nevertheless, he also promises annual growth of 7 percent, a figure Peru last reached briefly in 1998.

With Peru’s current economic structure, analysts say such a pace of growth would generate around 350,000 new jobs a year, or just enough to keep up with new entrants into the job market.

Humala, a former military commander who wants to restrict foreign investment in Peru, sees the solution in revising contracts in key mining and gas industries to increase state control, raise taxes and redistribute income to the poor.

Businesses and investors say that would scare off investment. A similar strategy employed by a Peruvian military government in the 1970s sent the economy spiraling into a 30-year slide.

Economists instead recommend measures such as cutting the bureaucracy that stifles entrepreneurship, helping unregistered businesses leave the informal sector, diversifying away from mining and cutting the bloated state payroll.

Around 90 percent of Peru’s budget goes to public sector salaries and debt servicing, leaving little room for government investment, which can help fuel economic growth.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/international/446598/perus_economic_trickle_down_proves_elusive/index.html

20080711 – Peru’s Economic Model and Poverty Reduction: Is It Working?

The relationship between Bolivia and Peru has deteriorated rapidly over the last year, in part because of disagreements on foreign trade issuess. Recently, Peruvian President Alan Garcia and his Bolivian counterpart, Evo Morales, engaged in personal attacks which served to increase tensions between the two Andean nations. On July 2nd, Garcia attacked Morales by saying the latter was jealous of Peruvian economic growth. Maybe Garcia has a point in observing that Peru’s economic growth is more robust than Bolivia’s, but economic growth is not necessarily the ultimate objective for a country; more important may be the satisfaction of its citizens, which in Peru is trending downward because of growing inequality.

In its chronic struggle against poverty, Latin America has experimented with various economic models. These have included the neoliberal policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which have led to increased inequality. Some see neoliberal failures as responsible for the leftist wave that has spread across the region. Peru, however, is one of the two countries in Latin America that have not been tempted recently by solutions calling for the abandonment of the neoliberal development model.

The Peruvian model has produced an exceptional economic growth over the last five years. In 2007, Peru’s GDP growth rate was more than eight percent. The following year, the U.S. ratings agency Fitch gave Peru an investment-grade rating, meaning that after thorough analysis of recent economic trends, the agency now considers Peru a safe and hospitable investment venture.

Profitable policies, but largely for the elite
Unfortunately, as the country’s economy grew, so did its inequality. This trend is especially evident in contrasting Peru’s coastal region with the Andes, with most of the increase in personal income being concentrated in Lima and other coastal urban areas. This can readily be seen in the luxurious beach clubs to the south of Lima, which epitomize the often fabulous wealth of the Peruvian elites. In contrast, Peru’s National Statistics and Information Institute (INEI) recently reported that rural highlands were the least succesful areas in reducing poverty during 2007. Many communities here still practice subsistence agriculture and suffer from extreme poverty, even though the region is rich in mineral resources – Peru’s main export.

During the Alejandro M. Toledo presidency (2000–2005), Peru’s Gini coefficient increased from 49.8 in 2000 to 52 in 2003, demonstrating a considerable rise in inequality. The significance of this injustice is not just statistical or ideological, because increasing economic inequality inevitably leads to public dissatisfaction, which in turn contributes to the country’s instability. Public dissatisfaction with uneven growth was manifested in Toledo’s approval ratings, which were the lowest in South America in 2004. This apparently has been recognized by the new president, Alan Garcia, who announced in May a budget increase of S./ 203 million (around $70 million) for the social program ‘Juntos’ which originally was launched by Toledo in 2005.

The ‘Juntos’ program: squandered genius?
The ‘Juntos’ program provides subsidies to poor families on the condition that they regularly send their children to schools and health centers. ‘Juntos’ is an attempt to recreate programs taken from Mexican and Brazilian models, which were designed to increase literacy rates and decrease economic inequality. Unfortunately, objective conditions in Peru make this program unlikely to succeed, because the nation’s primary education and healthcare systems are among the most inadequate in the world. Additionally, the program has targeted urban areas and neglected rural regions, which are most in need of government assistance.

It would not be surprising if ‘Juntos’ does not fulfill its purpose because Lima has proven extremely innefficient at implementing social programs in the past. The ‘Vaso de Leche’ effort in the 1990s failed to achieve its goal of reducing malnutrition in five-year-old children, even though it was the most widespread program of its kind in the country. Such examples reaffirm the challenge that would be involved in successfully expanding the ‘Juntos’ program. Ultimately, ‘Juntos’ expansion cannot contribute to sustainable development if the country’s education and healthcare structures are not first reformed.

Still, some statistics suggest that ‘Juntos’ may be helping to decrease overall poverty. The INEI recently announced a sizeable 5.2 reduction in poverty in 2007. However, many have questioned the validity of these numbers, including Farid Matuk, an ex-president of INEI, who guesses that such numbers might be forged. They suggest a poverty reduction rate of 0.6 percent per each point of GDP growth, which is three times higher than the average of previous years. At this rate, Peru would eliminate poverty completely in about 10 years, which strains credulity. Despite the surprising results, several institutions, including the World Bank and two Peruvian universities, supervised the study’s methods and verified the validity of the statistics. If they are valid, then ‘Juntos’ may yet be the reason behind the reduction in poverty, considering it was being implemented when the purported drop began to accelerate.

Development must be sustainable
Every effort must be made to continue to promote poverty reduction. In the past, social programs repeatedly have failed to create sustainable development within the Peruvian neoliberal model. The economic expansion experienced by Peru between 1991 and 1997 in factreduced poverty by several points. However, the subsequent 1998 to 2001 recession was a huge step backwards, suggesting that the social programs in the 1990s failed to create sustainable development at the time. Will the new expansion be different, or will a future recession negate all of the advances which have been made?

Peru’s Economic Minister, Luis Carranza, optimistically has predicted that Peru will experience 10 to 15 years of economic growth starting in 2008. This would represent the longest expansion cycle in Peruvian history and would lead to a significant reduction in poverty. ‘Juntos’ could potentially play a part in Peru’s economic success, but for Carranza’s dream to become reality, the government must first take aggressive steps in favor of sustainable development and adequately address the problems of inequality, healthcare and education. Without such reforms in these areas, programs like ‘Juntos’ cannot create sufficient opportunities for the poor, no matter how carefully they are nurtured.

This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Guillermo Cornejo

http://www.coha.org/2008/07/peru%E2%80%99s-economic-model-and-poverty-reduction-is-it-working/

20090522 – Doubts grow about accuracy of Peru GDP numbers

By Terry Wade

LIMA, May 22 (Reuters) – Official statistics on economic growth in Peru may be too optimistic and painting a picture showing economic expansion when in fact the Andean country is in a recession, two Peruvian academics said.

Peru’s statistics agency, the INEI, started working with a new methodology for calculating gross domestic product in 2007, and its results sharply diverge from the previous model.

Bruno Seminario, an economics professor at the Universidad del Pacifico in Lima who has taken current data and run them threw the old model, says Peru’s economy is in fact shrinking at a time when President Alan Garcia says his country is largely sidestepping fallout from the global downturn.

“This change (to a new methodology) has generated so many distortions that nobody knows what’s going on,” Seminario told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

INEI director Renan Quispe, who declined to comment for this article but in the past has insisted he has “improved” the method for calculating GDP, has measured growth at 3.14 percent in January, 0.19 percent in February, and 3.05 percent in March using his new methodology.

But Seminario said that when the INEI’s previous model is used, the numbers look much worse and show economic contraction of 0.51 percent, 1.38 percent, and 1.71 percent in each of the first three months of this year.

He said Peru is suffering a recession similar to the one it fell into after the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis, and that Peru’s economy has ground to a halt after surging nearly 10 percent each of the last two years on a boom in commodities prices.

Seminario said the results produced by the new methodology the INEI is using are counterintuitive at a time when other indicators and countries that rely on commodities exports are suffering sharper declines.

The current slowdown has caused critics to take a closer look at official GDP numbers.

Economists also complain that the new methodology is a bit of a black box, wasn’t subjected to a public comment period by independent statisticians before being introduced, and that the official results suggest a series of flimsy assumptions were put into the new model.

“Nobody’s seen the survey or the deflators,” Seminario said. “The only sensible thing to do is for the INEI to publish both series of numbers.”

He isn’t the only critic.

Farid Matuk, the former head of the INEI who was fired from his job after Garcia took office, has also written that he thinks the numbers are inflated.

He has even gone so far to say that the government has filed several lawsuits against him in retaliation for criticizing the GDP numbers.

Garcia’s chief of staff, Yehude Simon, denied that the lawsuits were politically motivated, local radio reported on Friday.

Critics say the INEI is being imprudent by deriving some key numbers from estimates, instead of actual surveys.

Still other critics have compared Garcia’s administration to the Kirchner governments in Argentina, which private economists have criticized for manipulating official statistics for political ends.

“The strategy to alter part of the measurement of GDP is misguided because the sectors ‘other services,’ commerce, construction, among others, are measured between the four walls of the INEI,” Matuk has said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/economicNews/idUSN2237155420090522

20090324 – Hunger intensifies despite economic growth in Peru

32 percent of Peruvians get inadequate food

Slower economic growth likely to push up hunger rates

By Dana Ford

LIMA, March 24 (Reuters) – More Peruvians went hungry last year despite blazing economic growth, a sign that President Alan Garcia is stumbling in efforts to direct benefits of an impressive expansion to the poor.

The percentage of people in Peru with inadequate nutrition rose by more than 11 percent in 2008, faster than the economy’s 9.8 percent surge, according to the national statistics agency.

Now, 32 percent of Peruvians do not get enough to eat.

The results suggest the poor did not make gains during Peru’s economic boom last year. They also explain in part why the government is so unpopular in rural areas, where hunger rates are highest and leftist politicians like Ollanta Humala, who plans to run for office in 2011, draw support.

“The benefits of the economic boom have not been distributed equally,” said Federico Arnillas, president of a network of civic groups that works on poverty issues with the health and finance ministries.

Garcia, who embraced mainstream economic policies after his first term in the 1980s ended in runaway inflation that made adequate food too costly for millions of people, has said he wants to reduce poverty to 30 percent by the time he leaves office.

When he was re-elected in 2006, Garcia fervently pushed investment and free trade and his recipe to lift incomes seemed to work. Prices for Peru’s metal exports surged and domestic demand rose, contributing to rapid economic growth.

The national poverty rate fell 5 percent in 2007 to 39 percent, a year when inflation was low and public spending on food programs was relatively high.

But in 2008, hunger crept up, as inflation spiked on a global run up in food prices and aid spending fell. Peru’s poverty rate for last year is not yet available, but experts say the government may have lost ground. That could hurt Garcia’s approval rating, now at 34 percent.

“The numbers tell us there is a percentage of the population that is, quite literally, dying of hunger,” said Farid Matuk, a former director of the national statistics agency and a government critic.

In rural areas, where Garcia’s support is weak, the number of people not eating enough rose to 42.5 percent in 2008.

Arnillas said the increase stems from political decisions and pointed to cuts in social spending.

“It’s not a simple resource problem. It’s a political one,” he said of hunger in Peru.

LOOKING AHEAD

Advocates say slower economic growth this year will likely push hunger rates higher and are urging the government to adopt policies that prioritize food security.

Peru’s government is rolling out a $3 billion stimulus package meant to maintain investment and employment levels and increase public work projects. The plan, which aims for economic growth of at least 5 percent, also includes agricultural incentives to boost local food production.

Matuk, the former statistics agency head, said the government is too focused on high macroeconomic growth figures and should have paid more attention to the poor before the global economy entered a crisis.

Arnillas said Peru needs a bigger safety net as private economists forecast growth of less than 1 percent this year.

“We are worried the poor will wind up paying the cost of the crisis,” he said. “This is what happened in the past and we are working to make sure it does not happen again.” (Editing by Terry Wade and Vicki Allen)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN24355472

20090317 – Peru economy slows, growing by 3.1 pct in January

Peru’s boom sputtering? Economic growth slows to 3.1 pct in January
By ANDREW WHALEN
Associated Press Writer

LIMA, Peru (AP) _ Peru posted its lowest economic growth rate in years on Monday, saying it expanded by just 3.1 percent year-to-year in January amid signs that a three-year economic boom fueled by soaring metals prices could be sputtering.

The Andean nation’s economy grew by 9.8 percent last year, faster than China’s, but has slowed as the global financial crisis drives down prices and demand for its main mineral exports.

Peru’s statistics institute reported Monday that the economy grew by 3.1 percent in January over the same period a year earlier, the lowest monthly rate of President Alan Garcia’s term, which began in 2006.

 The report said exports fell 38.6 percent in January over the same period the year before.

The government is projecting 5 percent growth in 2009, which would be one of the highest in the world amid the global downturn. But analysts are already questioning the figure.

The government is implementing a $3 billion anti-crisis package aimed at infrastructure and public works to combat the effects of falling export prices.

The former head of the statistics institute, Farid Matuk, says the formal growth figure only represents reality for Peru’s upper crust. Despite soaring commodity prices that prompted growth rates of 8 percent in 2006, 8.9 percent in 2007 and 9.8 percent in 2008, job growth in Peru as a whole was stagnant, Matuk said.

Monday’s report said that overall employment from December 2008 through February 2009 fell by 0.7 percent in metropolitan Lima compared to the same period the year before, although it said that formal sector employment grew by 5.1 percent.

Matuk said statistics institute figures show that the number of employed Peruvians in metropolitan Lima who lack a college education has actually fallen by 3 percent since February 2007.

“In the past two years there have not been substantial improvements in household living standards and employment is basically stagnant because growth has been based on raw materials” like mining and other non-labor intensive industries, Matuk told the Associated Press.

20070720 – Perú aspira a una ambiciosa reducción de pobreza

AFP – 20/07/2007 – 18:26 (GMT)

El gobierno del socialdemócrata Alan García, que se había fijado como meta reducir de 50 a 40% el índice de pobreza en el Perú, apuntará hacia un objetivo más ambicioso con base en un crecimiento más equitativo luego de que el jueves se anunciara, tras revisar cifras, que el indicador bajó a 44,5%.

El anuncio fue hecho por el ministro de Economía, Luis Carranza, quien dijo que las nuevas cifras oficiales de pobreza muestran una inesperada reducción pero también muestran que los beneficios del crecimiento que llegaron de la mano del modelo económico neoliberal han sido insuficientes y desiguales.

“Las cifras revisadas arrojan una reducción significativa que no anticipábamos. Eso obliga a revisar la meta de reducción de la pobreza porque ahora es poco ambicioso bajar a 40% entre 2006 y 2011”, dijo Carranza a la radio RPP el viernes.

“La meta era bajar la pobreza de 50%, que era lo que creíamos que existía. Ahora (con una cifra más favorable) necesitamos metas más ambiciosas”, acotó el ministro tras explicar que “los beneficios del crecimiento no han sido del todo balanceados entre la costa urbana y las zonas rurales donde la pobreza ha crecido. Eso es dramático”.

El gobierno de Alan García se había planteado como meta reducir la pobreza durante su gestión de cinco años, lo que implicaría que más de 3 millones dejen la condición de pobres al finalizar su gestión.

Las nuevas cifras oficiales de 44,5%, válidas para el año 2006, representan una caída de 4,2 puntos porcentuales respecto al nivel de 48,7% que el gobierno de Alejandro Toledo anunció el 2005 antes de concluir su mandato (2001-2006).

La mayor reducción se produjo en el área urbana donde pasó de 36,8% en el 2005 a 31,2% en 2006, en tanto que en el área rural prácticamente se estancó (de 70,9% a 69,3%).

“Más programas sociales: esa es la gran tarea de este gobierno”, añadió Carranza, quien explicó que “el gasto público no ha sido eficiente y debe ser compensado para acabar con los desbalances del crecimiento”.

La pobreza supera el 50% en 12 de las 24 regiones peruanas. Y en las cinco regiones surandinas los niveles de pobreza superan el 70% bordeando el 90% en el caso de Huancavelica.

García empezó su gestión prometiendo erradicar la pobreza en la sierra sur que le fue adversa en las elecciones de 2006 en provecho de su contendor: el nacionalista Ollanta Humala, candidato del presidente de Venezuela Hugo Chávez.

El actual ministro de Economía peruano no es el único que quedó asombrado con las cifras de menor pobreza presentadas el jueves: “Es inverosímil que la pobreza baje cuatro puntos en un año”, dijo Farid Matuk, ex jefe del Inei (Instituto nacional de estadística e informática) bajo el gobierno de Toledo.

“La variación equivale a una reducción de medio millón de pobres en un año, es inverosímil”, insistió Matuk, quien acusó al gobierno de García de maquillar cifras para capitalizar los réditos políticos.

“Solo si el Gobierno impulsa un programa decidido de desarrollo rural que asegure que los hogares rurales puedan aprovechar las ventajas que una economía en expansión genera, es que este reto puede hacerse realidad”, dijo el analista Javier Escobal, economista de la ONG Grade citado por el diario El Comercio.

Perú creció a tasas superiores al 5% desde el 2003 y se estima oficialmente que este año podría superar el 7% tras crecer en un 8% el 2006.

http://noticias.terra.com/articulo/html/act907711.htm

Garcia takes power facing Peru poverty “time bomb”

 

By Robin Emmott  |  July 26, 2006

PUNO, Peru (Reuters) – President-elect Alan Garcia takes office on Friday warning Peru is a “time bomb” that could explode into crippling protests if his government cannot combine its pro-business agenda with cutting chronic poverty.

Garcia, who is anxious to make amends for his disastrous first term in 1985-1990 that sparked economic collapse, faces the huge challenge of delivering the benefits of Peru’s unprecedented economic growth since 2002, while keeping international bondholders happy with a careful fiscal policy.

Poor Peruvians make up half the country’s 27 million population, especially in the southern Andes bordering Bolivia, and most did not vote for Garcia. They are impatient for jobs, access to clean drinking water and schools and hospitals.

“We’ll give Garcia six months to show some results. If nothing’s happened, we’ll start the protests,” said Luis Vilcapaza, who represents some 100,000 farmers in Peru’s southern Andes province of Puno.

Investors are keen to avoid the kind of political instability that almost toppled outgoing President Alejandro Toledo in 2004 and take advantage of Peru’s oil, gas and mineral wealth. Peru is the world’s No. 3 copper-producing nation and aims to export natural gas to Mexico from 2010.

Garcia’s presidential win in June was by a slim margin, giving him a weak mandate in a fractured congress.

His left-leaning American Popular Revolutionary Alliance party, known as APRA, is in the minority, while the party of losing presidential candidate Ollanta Humala has promised fierce opposition from its 45 seats in congress, nine more than

APRA.

“We face a time bomb because during Toledo’s term, the economy grew to benefit only 30 percent of the population,” Garcia said in a speech this month to residents of a shanty town on the edge of Lima.

“We will create economic progress that will allow us to confront these time bombs.”

Peruvians in the south say they want the kind of economic nationalism favored by Venezuela’s anti-U.S. President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian leader Evo Morales, not policies supported by Wall Street such as privatization.

SOCIAL PROBLEMS LOOM

They say that is the only way to ease social ills in a country where the gross domestic product per capita is lower than in 1975.

About 62 percent of young Peruvians are poor, according to a study by the U.N. Population Fund and the Peruvian health ministry.

The number of Peruvian women who die during childbirth is one of the highest levels in Latin America. One in three women in Peru’s jungle region become pregnant before age 20.

Malaria, tuberculosis and sexual violence against women also are all major problems in Peru.

“Garcia urgently needs to help the young,” outgoing Health Minister Pilar Mazetti told Reuters. “Otherwise we’ll see frustrations boil over into protests, the formation of gangs and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.”

Farid Matuk, outgoing head of Peru’s National Statistics Institute, said the solution is not in faster economic growth, as Garcia has pledged, because the economy only needs to grow above 3.3 percent annually to alleviate poverty.

Rather, Garcia should aim to develop the economy away from its historic dependence on mineral exports by helping small businesses and improving the way public funds are spent.

Peru’s mining regions will receive a record $800 million in 2006 from royalties and taxes, equivalent to slightly more than the government’s total annual health and education budget. But locals and miners say the money is not being properly spent.

“We need to see jobs and better schools, working hospitals,” said 43-year-old rickshaw driver Gabriel Tipo, a widower in Puno with five children. “If things don’t get better, I think Humala should stage a coup and take over government.”

Peru Faces Controversy about Census

Lima, Oct 21 (Prensa Latina) A national population and housing census will be carried out on Sunday in Peru, amid controversy, regional conflicts, and even a religious conflict.

 

INEI, National Statistics and Computing Institute ex head Farid Matuk ratified his criticism to the census, after President Alan Garcia tried to discredit him, accusing him of fugitive, due to a trial against him for supposed mismanagement.

 

 

Matuk held that the census is unnecessary, its methodology is obsolete, the personnel in charge is lowly qualified, and it is only oriented to hinder the annual polls planned in a previous census that will be used to verify the real progress in social issues.

 

 

The president was obliged to call the people to leave aside any eagerness for convenience, and collaborate with the census, due to its importance for social programs.

 

 

He referred to general rejection of the irreplaceability order, given by the INEI for Sunday, for the citizenry to remain in its homes, which was changed for a recommendation, accompanied by prohibition of public transportation and businesses.

 

 

Meanwhile, several municipalities and provinces of the southern regions of Cusco, Ayacucho, Tacna, and Moquegua rejected the census, because they consider that it could affect the lawsuits about adjoining lands with other jurisdictions.

 

 

The Defense Front decided that the population of Moquegua did not participate in the census, a decision criticized by President Garcia, who warned that the mentioned area would be left out of the social programs.

 

 

Representatives of the Protestant Christian churches criticized the president for having exhorted the population to not answer the census question about the religion they profess, because that is relevant to convictions, of which nobody should be questioned about.

 

 

Peruvian Protestan Pastor Fraternity President David Cauracuri said the presidential declaration was inopportune, and called to ignore it.

 

 

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PERU: Upbeat Poverty Stats Questioned

By Milagros Salazar

LIMA, May 29 (IPS) – The Peruvian government has announced that poverty fell by 5.2 percent in a year and forecasts that by 2015, less than 10 percent of the population will be below the poverty line. But experts and provincial governors cast doubt on these figures, given the unmet basic needs of peasant families.

“These poverty figures show that Peru’s economic model is working,” Finance Minister Luis Carranza said on Wednesday after announcing that according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI), the proportion of people living in poverty dropped from 44.5 percent of the population in 2006 to 39.3 percent in 2007.

This means that nearly 1.4 million Peruvians have escaped poverty, and is an improvement on the 42 percent poverty rate projected by the authorities. President Alan García celebrated the result, saying that he had not been over-optimistic when he promised that by the end of his term, in 2011, poverty would be reduced to 30 percent.

“I can tell the country that my aspirations go even further and that by 2015 we will have a poverty rate of less than 10 percent of the population, which means that Peru will no longer be a Third World country,” said the president, making a forecast that exceeds his five-year term of office.

Meanwhile, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty shrank from 16.1 percent to 13.7 percent of the population. The country’s Andean highlands, as opposed to the coastal and Amazon jungle regions of Peru, are home to 67.5 percent of the extreme poor.

The results of the 2007 census, to be released on Jun. 9, will give a more precise idea of how many people have been lifted out of poverty, and what extrapolations can be made, said the head of INEI, Renán Quispe.

President García did not make allowances in his calculations for population growth, which is occurring at a rate of 1.3 percent a year. According to the latest official statistics, 27.2 million people live in Peru.

But Farid Matuk, a former head of INEI, said that the figures given out by the authorities were not credible.

“In spite of the nine percent gross domestic product growth posted in 2007, the García administration could not possibly have managed to reduce poverty by nearly 10 percent in two years, when the previous government of President Alejandro Toledo only achieved a fall of six points in five years,” Matuk told IPS.

The expert also said the García administration has manipulated the figures by increasing the 2005 poverty rate by nearly four percentage points, from 44.5 to 48 percent of the population, by changing the method used to measure poverty.

“These results are completely illogical. I suspect that urban incomes have been inflated in order to show this reduction in poverty,” Matuk said.

That would explain that poverty was reported to have fallen most in urban areas, from 31.2 to 25.7 percent.

But the figures show apparent improvement in rural areas as well. Between 2005 and 2006 rural poverty fell by only 1.6 percent, but in 2007 it was reduced by 4.7 percent.

The highlands region showed the least progress in fighting rural poverty, with a total reduction of only 3.2 percent, while in coastal rural areas poverty dropped by up to 11 percent.

In Matuk’s view, the INEI experts may have overvalued the prices assigned to the food grown by rural families

Since many families, mainly in the rural areas, grow their own food or provide their own essential services, such as water, INEI assigns these goods a value which, in Matuk’s opinion, should be made public, in order to assess the reliability of their figures.

Based on this method, INEI set the poverty line at 229.4 soles (82 dollars) a month per person, and the extreme poverty line at 121.2 soles (43 dollars) a month. Persons consuming less than these amounts are considered poor, or extremely poor, respectively.

“It’s important to know what price was assigned to some foods like eggs and potatoes, and also, for example, what value was established for ‘self-rent’ in marginalised urban areas. So far none of this is known, so the poverty lines are a mystery,” he said.

In response to the criticism, INEI published this information on its web site on Tuesday, and experts are now analysing it. INEI emphasised that it had received advice from the World Bank and several research centres in drawing up its report.

“The results are in compliance with international guidelines, and most importantly, they are transparent,” said World Bank regional director Felipe Jaramillo.

Matuk said that one way of demonstrating that the economic growth achieved between 2006 and 2007 had no impact on the living conditions of the majority of the population is that hunger had only been reduced by just over one percent — “in other words, hardly at all” — over the same period.

For his part, Pedro Francke, an economist at the Pontificia Catholic University, concluded that the method used by INEI did not take into account higher food prices, and was only showing one side of poverty. He said the institute should use a much broader form of measurement that is not only monetary.

“The quality of health and education services that are provided to the population should be measured, as well as whether or not people have identity documents, and what access they have to democracy, for example,” said Francke.

Several provincial governors expressed doubts that poverty reduction in their area could have been as great as the statistics suggest, especially in provinces where historically over 70 percent of the people were considered poor.

“The statistics must have been manipulated, because people are still protesting in the streets due to the fact that they are not seeing the benefits of economic growth. INEI does not measure poverty in villages and towns in the rural areas, where the extreme poor are concentrated,” Hernán Fuentes, the governor of Puno, told IPS.

In his southern Andean region, poverty fell from 76.3 percent to 67.2 percent, according to the official figures.

The poverty rate also fell in Ayacucho, another southern Andean province, from 78.4 to 68.3 percent. “We were sure that poverty had fallen by three or four percent, but not to such an extent. I hope it’s true,” said Governor Ernesto Molina.

Loreto, in the northeast, is the province that apparently made the most progress, with a spectacular 11.7 percent drop in the poverty rate. Governor Iván Vásquez said that such a reduction was indeed possible, but mainly in large cities like Iquitos, the provincial capital, where over half of the population lives.

In Cuzco, however, the poverty rate rose from 49.9 to 57.4 percent. “The social programmes aren’t working, because out of every 10 soles the government allocates to fight malnutrition or poverty, six are swallowed up by bureaucracy,” said Governor Hugo González.

Huancavelica remains the poorest province, with 85.7 percent of the population below the poverty line, after a reduction of barely three percent. ( END/2008 )

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