Paraguay

Abstract

Poverty in Paraguay decreased from 24.0% in 2016 to 22.3% in 2020 and remained below the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) average of 26.3%. These figures mask the effect of strong efforts to decrease poverty before the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought the figure down to 19.4% in 2019. Extreme poverty consistently decreased in that period, from 7.9% to 6.0%, below the LAC average (8.7%). The population living in completely informal households decreased from 66.4% in 2009 to 58.0% in 2018 higher than the LAC average of 36.3%. Regarding environmental indicators, in 2019, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per capita were 7.0 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (t CO2e), higher than the average for LAC (6.3) but below the average for countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (9.1). That year, the share of the population exposed to air pollution levels that pose risks to human health (PM2.5 at more than 10 µg/m3) was 100%, higher than 95.4% for LAC and 61.0% for the OECD. On the fiscal side, environmentally related tax revenue was 0.9% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020, below LAC average (1.0%) and the OECD average (2.1%). Total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP in 2020 (13.4%) remained considerably lower than the averages for LAC (21.9%) and the OECD (33.5%).