Download file 502 KB Texto completo en español More of: Felipe  Larraín Bascuñán

The Basic Needs Basket is used to measure poverty in Chile. The base is a minimum food basket and a multiplication factor that provides the total cost of satisfying the minimum food and non-food needs. The result is compared to household income. According to official figures, poverty would have fallen from 18.7% of the population in 2003 to 13.7% in 2006. However, the basket now used was elaborated on the basis of consumer patterns in homes in Greater Santiago in the period 1987-1988. Many economic, demographic and social changes have taken place since then that make a revision of the poverty line necessary. This can now be done with the information from the 5th Survey on Household Budgets, conducted between 1996 and 1997, and already used a few years back to update the CPI basket.
This work is based on the analysis developed by the Foundation to Overcome Poverty to update the poverty line using official information. This article redoes the calculations on that basis and determines that 29% of the population was still impoverished in 2006, i.e. more than twice the official figure. The different concepts of poverty are explained in detail in the development of the argument as well as the reasons why the line must be updated and the pending challenges.