Poverty in Latin America fell by 2.2 percentage points in 2024 compared to the previous year and now affects 25.5% of the population, the lowest level since comparable data have been available, ECLAC reported. Last year, 162 million Latin Americans were living in poverty in the region, of whom 62 million were in extreme poverty.
“The incidence of monetary poverty (measured by income) observed in 2024 in the region is the lowest value since there have been comparable data,” said the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in its 2025 Social Panorama report. The reduction in poverty is explained mainly by the results of Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Brazil.
“This is fundamentally due to the demographic weight of these countries, which together account for 52% of the total population,” even though they were not the places where poverty fell the most, said ECLAC’s executive secretary, José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, at a press conference. In both cases, since this is an income-based measure, the increase in real wage levels had an impact.
In Mexico, other factors also played a role, including university scholarship policies, state cash transfers to vulnerable populations, and the universalization of pensions, the head of the UN technical body added. The drop in poverty levels in Latin America is occurring in a context of post-pandemic normalization, with a recovering labor market and a gradual decline in inflation.
The increase in prices, linked to other shocks such as the war in Ukraine, which especially affected food and energy, has also begun to ease. For 2025, ECLAC projects a slight further reduction in poverty, given the region’s “limited growth prospects.”
Despite the progress, the agency warned that income concentration remains extreme in Latin America: the richest 10% captures 34.2% of total income, while the poorest 10% receives only 1.7%. “The average Gini index (which measures income inequality) in Latin America and the Caribbean is the highest of all regions in the world and is surpassed only by one subregion of Africa (Sub-Saharan Africa),” ECLAC states in its report.
