WHAT is it to be poor in Peru? Gonzalo Sánchez,a single father with health problems who is a portion-time lecturer at a public university with a son studying to be a designer, often can’t afford an evening meal. Manuela Cuevas makes ends meet thanks to her retired husband’s odd jobs and her live-in son-in-law’s income as a manager at a security firm. Gina Palomino, or her husband and their three children scrape by on his income from occasional building work and her street-corner sales of fruit,interrupted now that she is pregnant. Their names are not real, but their situations are. So are the tens of thousands of farmers whose crops were not insured and were lost to flooding final year. As these cases point to, or crossing the poverty line in either direction depends on countless details of circumstance.
In this century,Peru has been spectacularly successful in reducing poverty, more so than any other country in Latin America, and according to the UN. The share of the population that is poor fell from 55% in...
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Source: economist.com