El “problema” de JUNTOS

“(En Juntos) si están los mas pobres pero que aún falta incluir a mas familias que también se encuentran en situación de pobreza”

http://MartinTanaka.blogspot.com

La primera información relativa a lo que conocemos hoy como JUNTOS, provino de una denuncia efectuada por Rosa María Palacios, quien distorsionó el valor de la transferencia y la población beneficiada, lo que era evidente haciendo un cálculo a mano alzada. Recuerdo que la cifra era el equivalente a una autopista de Lima a Piura, y esto era evidentemente irreal.

Conforme se conocían mas detalles del programa, el diario Peru21 tituló en primera plana la ausencia del INEI en el diseño del mismo, con el agravante que era el INEI la oficina del estado que medía la pobreza desde la operación de campo de efectuar entrevistas a hogares hasta los cálculos matemático que determinan los umbrales de la pobreza, y la incidencia de ella en las regiones.

Por ello, en mi calidad de titular del INEI fui convocado a Palacio de Gobierno para participar en los detalles de implantación de JUNTOS, cuyo concepto básico era una transferencia monetaria condicionada a metas que los hogares debían cumplir. Siendo el primer problema identificar la población objetivo.

En las primeras reuniones estaban los ministros de los sectores sociales (Educación, Salud, y Desarrollo Social), y esporádicamente la Presidencia del Consejo de Ministros y el Ministerio de Economía. Estas primeras reuniones fueron para establecer un consenso en torno a la población objetivo, siendo el primer dilema si se efectuaba un programa nacional, solo urbano, o solo rural.

El contexto político de ese momento eran las continuas denuncias de filtraciones en los programas sociales, es decir personas que no reunían las condiciones para ser beneficiarias obtenían los beneficios. Por ello una primera decisión fue que el programa se inicie exclusivamente en el ámbito rural, ya que la posibilidad de filtración era per se menor.

Una segunda decisión fue la identificación de los potenciales beneficiarios, siendo la característica central del programa la entrega de dinero en efectivo, se procuró obtener listas nominales de beneficiarios de los programas sociales vigentes. Esta búsqueda resultó inútil, pero obligó a JUNTOS a ser el primer programa social con una nómina exacta de beneficiarios.

La búsqueda inútil empezó por el INEI quien tiene un registro de cantidad de beneficiarios del “Vaso de Leche”, pero era incapaz de obtener de los municipios los nombres de las personas. Luego continuo el MINDES que administra los “Comedores Populares”, él cual tenía cuadernos Loro cuyo detalle eran nombres de pila y apodos de los beneficiaros. El Ministerio de Salud administra el “SIS – Sistema Integral de Salud” con nombres completos en una base de datos digital, pero sin direcciones o DNI. Y finalmente el Ministerio de Educación que no tiene los nombres de los estudiantes de cada uno de los colegios públicos.

Para ese entonces, se había publicado en El Peruano el formulario del SISFHO (Sistema de Focalización de Hogares) el cual era una herramienta estadística para medir el grado de bienestar social de un hogar, sin el detalle que implica el cuestionario de la ENAHO (Encuesta Nacional de Hogares) que consiste en tres horas de entrevista, y es la herramienta convencional de medición de la pobreza. Y este formulario SISFHO se convirtió en la alternativa inmediata para identificar beneficiarios y elaborar un padrón de los mismos.

El distrito de Chuschi (Cangallo, Ayacucho) por su significado histórico se toma como distrito piloto, y el INEI aplica con recursos propios (todavía el JUNTOS no existía legalmente) el cuestionario SISFHO a todas las viviendas de Chuschi. Un elemento fundamental para entender porque no se censo este distrito piloto con la ENAHO, es que el costo unitario en el ámbito rural es de US$ 75, mientras que el cuestionario SISFHO es de US$ 10.

Si bien el cuestionario SISFHO tenía un costo menor al de la ENAHO, aplicar este cuestionario a todas las viviendas de cada distrito objetivo de JUNTOS era un costo significativo en el presupuesto, y esto abrió un debate técnico entre el Ministerio de Economía y el Instituto de Estadística para evaluar alternativas de cuestionarios de menor costo.

La principal virtud del cuestionario SISFHO era identificar grises, es decir no blanco y negro. Con la información de este cuestionario, es posible construir un modelo matemático en donde la población entrevistada se diferencie en diez grupos consistentes entre sí para las políticas pública que se consideren pertinentes.

Pero JUNTOS no necesitaba grises, sino dicotomizar entre blanco y negro, entre beneficiarios y no beneficiarios, y para ello el INEI diseño un cuestionario simplificado de US$ 5 que tenía la misma potencia estadística del cuestionario SISFHO en el ámbito rural, que su diseño era para aplicación nacional. Luego de varias simulaciones, el cuestionario del INEI fue la herramienta de barrido de cada vivienda para los distritos objetivos del programa.

Una vez aplicado el cuestionario, y los datos digitados en una base de datos, el INEI aplicaba un modelo estadístico para establecer un puntaje a cada uno de los hogares entrevistados, y tomando como referencia el puntaje de un hogar promedio rural de la ENAHO, esta base de datos era entregada a JUNTOS, que aplicada los criterios específicos del programa (infantes y/o mujeres embarazadas), para establecer la lista definitiva de beneficiarios.

La evaluación efectuada por el Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, cuyo detalle se encuentra en el blog citado al comienzo de esta nota, produce un resultado político donde el mayor problema de JUNTOS es su éxito en no equivocarse, en JUNTOS no hay filtraciones, porque los criterios de beneficio fueron estrictos, y si algún error hubo fue de exclusión de legítimos beneficiarios, y no de inclusión de ilegítimos beneficiaros.

Esta situación es un clásico de la teoría estadística y se conoce como Errores Tipo I y Errores Tipo II. En caso se excluye los casos que debieran ser incluidos y esto es un error; así como también los casos que se incluyen y debieran ser excluidos. La decisión de que error priorizar depende del entorno social.

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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 )

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42586