A story about equal­ity for young peo­ple in Argentina and Brazil gives us some facts and fig­ures about poverty in those countries.

The United Nations Devel­op­ment Pro­gramme com­mis­sioned a report that asks if young peo­ple think that they have an equal chance to suc­ceed. In the report, Argentina youth felt that things were unequal, which is a blow to the county’s vision of an equi­table soci­ety. Mean­while, youth in Brazil had good hope for equality.

For our snip­pet, we focus on the fig­ures on poverty lev­els from the two coun­tries. From the IPS, writer Marcela Valente pre­sented the poverty lev­els and how those can impact the lives of young people.

Argentina is high­lighted as hav­ing the low­est poverty rate in the Mer­co­sur bloc, along with Uruguay. The Eco­nomic Com­mis­sion for Latin Amer­ica and the Caribbean (ECLAC) puts it at 21 per­cent, while the offi­cial national fig­ure for 2006 was 26.9 per­cent, the report says.

But (soci­ol­o­gist Ser­gio) Balar­dini said that the major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion liv­ing below the poverty line are chil­dren and young peo­ple. “If they can’t get a qual­ity edu­ca­tion, and also have to take on respon­si­bil­i­ties pre­ma­turely, there is an inter-generational repro­duc­tion of poverty,” he warned.

“The dis­crim­i­na­tion expe­ri­enced by young peo­ple who are poor is one man­i­fes­ta­tion of inequal­ity. They live in a con­sumer soci­ety where ‘to be’ is ‘to con­sume,’ and this abruptly dis­pos­sesses them at a time when they need to make great efforts to con­struct their iden­tity,” the soci­ol­o­gist said.

Since 2007, poverty and inequal­ity lev­els have increased in Argentina. How­ever, it is the Mer­co­sur coun­try with the high­est per­cent­age of stu­dents com­plet­ing uni­ver­sity stud­ies: one out of every eight young peo­ple aged 25 to 29, accord­ing to the study.

But it also found that the pop­u­la­tion below the age of 30 rep­re­sents almost 60 per­cent of the unem­ployed in Argentina, as well as in Brazil and Uruguay.

The report describes the incor­po­ra­tion into the labour mar­ket on par­tic­u­larly dis­ad­van­ta­geous terms as “unfavourable inclu­sion,” a trend that is on the rise. Sim­i­larly, it says that in some cases the unem­ployed young­sters are “the third gen­er­a­tion of unem­ployed, which weak­ens inter-generational trans­mis­sion of the cul­ture of work.”

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