MEXICO CITY (AP) — More than 8.3 million people in Mexico were pulled out of poverty between 2022 and 2024, according to a report released by Mexico’s statistics agency on Wednesday.
It marks a nearly 18% drop in people living in poverty in a country that has long struggled with high levels of economic precarity and unemployment. The number of people living in extreme poverty dropped 23% while those in moderate poverty dropped more than 16%, according to the report by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). Today, one in three Mexicans still live in poverty.
“This is a photograph” of the country, said Claudia Maldonado, a researcher at INEGI.
While INEGI took over research of poverty rates from a previous government entity, official and independent researchers say the data is comparable.
Manuel Martínez Espinoza, a researcher at Mexico’s National Council of the Humanities, Sciences and Technologies, said the dip can be largely be attributed to two policies championed by former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The Mexican populist, who remained highly popular even after he left office last year, built his political movement on heavy support from poorer and rural-dwelling Mexicans with the promise that he would put the poor first and more equally distribute wealth in the Latin American nation.
Martínez Espinoza said that while the decrease in poverty is likely due to a range of factors in an economy as diverse as Mexico’s, López Obrador raising Mexico’s minimum wage and instituting a roster of social welfare programs appears to have paid off.
Access to social security, food security and dignified living conditions have all gone up, according to the INEGI report, though gains in other things like access to health services didn’t catch up to major losses felt in years past.
Between 2018, the year López Obrador took office, and 2025, Mexico’s minimum wage tripled, jumping from 88.40 pesos ($4.75) to 278.80 pesos ($15) a day.
At the same time, López Obrador’s government scrapped a host of existing social programs and installed their own, quickly increasing overall social spending to unprecedented heights for senior citizens, unemployed youth, students, farmers and people with disabilities.
The programs have also been criticized as the reforms dramatically shifted who was getting that money, as universal pension benefits also put money in the pockets of Mexico’s wealthiest who didn’t really need the cash injection.
Martínez Espinoza noted that the cash transfers may not be a long-term solution to tackle poverty in Mexico, as poverty could jump once again if such programs end.
“If people stop receiving (the transfers), they could fall back into poverty because there wasn’t enough investment in things other than addressing people’s most immediate needs,” he said.
