Economy & Business - November 2023

COSTA RICA | Poverty edges down but inequality stagnates. On 19 October Costa Rica’s national statistics institute (Inec) released new figures showing that 21.8% of the country’s households are living in poverty, equivalent to 390,509 households. This is down 1.2 percentage points on 2022, when 23.0% of households were considered poor, a drop of 8,930 households. However, Inec notes that there was no “significant difference” in the rate of extreme poverty, with 6.3% of households (112,916) considered extremely poor, down from 6.4% in 2022. The same figures show that there was minimal difference in inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality in which 0 = total equality and 1 = absolute inequality), which Inec puts at 0.502, down from 0.504 in 2022.