The risk of poverty in Portugal rose to 17% in 2023, which put an additional 60,000 people at risk of becoming poor, a reality that mainly affected women, reveals the report “Portugal, Balanço Social 2023”.
According to data from the report, which is publicly presented today, and includes some preliminary data from the Income and Living Conditions Survey (ICOR), from the National Statistics Institute (INE), for 2023, the poverty risk rate increased by 0.6 percentage points between 2022 and 2023, going from 16.4% to 17%.
“The number of people at risk of poverty increased by 60 thousand”, reads the report, carried out by researchers Susana Peralta, Bruno P. Carvalho and Miguel Fonseca, from the Nova School of Business & Economics.
This increase means that in 2023 the number of people living at risk of poverty exceeded 1.77 million.
According to the analysis carried out, “the poverty rate increased mainly among women, with an increase of 0.9 percentage points in 2023”.
It also states that “the increase in the prevalence of poverty is reflected in all age groups, especially among children, whose poverty rate increased by 2.2 percentage points compared to 2022”.
The report’s data show that the “prevalence of poverty is greater in autonomous regions”, where there is also more material and social deprivation and inequality in the distribution of income.
“The poverty rate is almost 10 percentage points above the national average in Madeira, the region with the highest poverty rate in Portugal, and nine percentage points above the national average in the Azores”, the report reads.