On the Poverty Report

I haven't had a chance to comment on the new poverty figures; here's the gist from Aguachile:

There are now at least 52 million poor in Mexico, out of which 11.7 live in extreme poverty.

In percent, poverty went up from 44.5 percent of the population to 46.2 percent in 2010 - more than three million more poor.

And this is real poverty: The number of people who can't even cover sufficiently their daily nutritional needs went from 23.8 to 28 million.

Peña Nieto's Mexico State came out worst, with biggest rise of those in extreme poverty - 200,000 more in these two years - with PRI-led Veracruz and the Jalisco of Emilio González right behind.

Calderón's answer to the CONEVAL report was chiefly to blame the international crisis: "It was out of our hands."

I think the "out of our hands" bit needs to be coupled with the fact that Calderón's government launched a rather weak stimulus in response to the recovery (just $40 billion), which ran out of money after about eight months. He couldn't have prevented the housing bubble bursting or the American recession, but it would be interesting to see an estimate of what those figures would be like had they put together a stimulus worth twice that amount, and seen it through to the end. Though this report makes me wonder how viable a much larger package would have been.

Also, how did Los Pinos manage to slip the swine flu into the headline of this Excélsior piece on the reasons for the upsurge, with nothing to support that assertion? This is doubly silly as the administration is trumpeting its actions to reduce poverty in Mexico City.