The wage crash: how many basic necessities an employee was able to buy in the last four elections

Every two years, the electoral ritual asks the question: Do you vote with your ideas or do you vote with your pocket? As pollsters and political scientists debate it, it is clear that Argentinian employees arrive at each election to the polls in a worse situation than the previous one, in some cases and better in others, depending on their consumption basket.

An analysis of the board Analytica compared how the voter arrived in the PASO elections from 2013 to today and what purchasing capacity to make basic consumption had at every opportunity.

Based on the average salary recorded at the CABA of a 40-year-old, estimated from data from the Permanent Household Survey, this voter could buy 521.3 kilos of bread before PASO 2013; today he can only acquire 372.3 kilograms. Or he could consume 220 kilos of barbecue, so present during the previous election campaign; and now it’s been cut in half, 109.4 kilos.

That same salary was 1,367 liters of milk or 394.7 packs of yerba mate in 2013, but it now stands at 894.5 liters or just 174 packs, respectively. To gain access to owning a small car, he had to work for this income for just over 15 months in 2013, while today he has to do it for nearly 25 salaries, or 23 if the bonus effect is added.

“Inflation is the biggest destroyer of family income. We have given very concrete examples of what this effect means in terms of food purchasing power, or the impact it has on the loss of real wages on basic consumption, ”he said. . Infobae Ricardo Delgado, director of the consultancy firm Analytica.

According to the economist, the last four years have been the ones with the “biggest drop in wages” in the last ten years in which it had already fallen. “Although in recent months there has been some reorganization of wages due to greater parity and more social spending in vulnerable sectors, when you look at these numbers, you can see that none of this is happening. has been corrected.”

“In recent months, there has been some restructuring of the salary due to greater parity and more social spending in vulnerable sectors” (Delgado)

With two salaries from fiscal year Analytica, you could buy two refrigerators in 2017; in 2021, only 1.2. A salary reached four years ago to buy 1,144.4 liters of gasoline while today with the same salary we only buy 766.7 liters.

Another significant data concerns the rent, based on a 3-room apartment (70 m2) in the Caballito area. In 2013, he took 43% of that salary; now it reaches 81 percent.

Delgado stressed that these data are “one more demonstration that the inflation problem must be solved” and in this sense he downplayed the effect of any plans to contain food inflation, such as controls repeated prices in recent years.

“When you look at this nearly 40% drop in purchasing power over the past four years, measured in kilos of roastingObviously, these types of policies do not solve the problem of food inflation, the central part of the consumer basket of popular sectors, such as the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The fall is really steep, which shows that taking isolated measures to control inflation is going nowhere, because it always ends up beating wages, ”said Delgado.

Along with the destruction of the purchasing power of wages, each season leading up to elections, different governments are looking for recipes to fix it. For something, it is said that in odd years, there is always less budgetary discipline to seduce voters with social spending policies. “The government has tried by various means to generate a pre-election ‘economic summer’ climate since June. In light of the hard data, it seems that there has not been much success and once again the electorate is preparing to face an electoral process with a deterioration in its standard of livingI recall a report from the consulting firm Invecq headed by Esteban Domecq.

“The government has tried by various means to generate a pre-election ‘economic summer’ climate since June. In view of the concrete data, it seems that he did not succeed very well in achieving this ”(Invecq)

According to the firm, taking as a benchmark the average salary recorded in the private sector over the past two years, there was a decrease in purchasing power of 5.5%. In the months preceding the STEP of 2019, the gross salary analyzed was $ 92,790 at values ​​equivalent to those today, currently it does not reach $ 88,000, that is to say it There was a drop in constant money of 5,000 pesos.

The drop in income that voters will have during these elections, according to Invecq, comes “after a period when there had already been a significant deterioration. And this, according to the ruling party’s own explanation, was the main cause of the Cambiemos government’s defeat. Between the 2017 PASOs and those of 2019, registered private salaried employment fell by around 100,000 workers following the crisis that began in April 2018. At the same time, the purchasing power of wages had fallen by 12%. Too much rain, wet”.

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