The president of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), Julio Santaella, indicated that in the current school year, there are figures that indicate that 5.3 million people between 3 and 29 years of age did not enroll in school for reasons of Covid or other fundamentally economic reasons.
By participating in the panel Social impacts of the Covid 19 pandemic, of the XLIX national convention of the Mexican Institute of Finance Executives (IMEF), Santaella contextualized that before the pandemic 33.5 million students, in the aforementioned age range, were enrolled in the 2019-2020 school year.
This figure was reduced to 32.9 million in the following school year 2020-2021, already with the pandemic underway.
In education, Nora Lustig, professor of Latin American economics and founding director of the Commitment to Equity Institute in Tulane at the University of New Orleans, argued that “the pandemic has as a consequence the fact that we not only have to face inequality and poverty monetary policy in the short term (…) in the long term the closure of schools and the effect on human capital may have as a consequence a reduction in intergenerational mobility, an increase in inequality of opportunities and may also translate into a significant increase in the inequality of labor income ”, he warned.
Meanwhile, Edna Jaime, from Mexico Evalúa, agreed that it is worrying that the gaps in education are opening, since the current generation of lower-income students may have a setback of up to 50 years.
Impact on income
On the other hand, the head of Inegi also reported that during the pandemic there was a reduction in income in 90% of the country’s households, which affected practically all items of household spending, with the exception of health, where it increased by 40 percent.
In terms of the labor market, he said, the coronavirus limited the labor supply, while there were significant cuts in the distribution of income that workers were receiving.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx