Santo Domingo.- Dominican Republic’s falling poverty rates in the last years is mainly due to remittances and not to the social policies or subsidies to achieve that objective, the economist Miguel Ceara Hatton affirmed Thurs.
The also consultant to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) said the country’s monetary poverty rate fell from 41.2% in 2009 to 22.8% in 2018. “Meanwhile, extreme poverty fell from 11.2% to 2.9% during the same period, as reflected in official figures.”
Remittances play an important role in falling poverty levels. The poverty rate of the population that receives money transfers from abroad is 33.3%, but if those households didn’t receive the currencies the figure would skyrocket to 60.8%.