FYROM News : 30% of FYROM citizens live in Poverty

in FYROM news / by D-Mak / on July 12, 2012 at 11:55 pm /

FYROM News – While FYROM’s government insists on wasting money to provocative actions against its neighbouring countries like “Skopje 2014”, every third FYROM’s citizen is poor, according to the State Statistical Office. The poverty rate in FYROM during 2011 was 30.4 %.

Compared to the previous year when the poverty rate stood at 30.9 %, the decrease is insignificant. Half of the poor citizens are unemployed, younger than 40 and usually married with children.

Statistically as much as 31 % of the poor are owners of university or college degrees. The education of the head of the family also has an effect of the number of poor people.

Statistics show alsothat 54.6 % of the poor live in households in which the head of the family has no education or has attended only elementary school.

There are many critics of the government in the country who openly say, “People don’t have bread and they are pouring millions into statues in order to gain cheap political points”. University professors studying this matter are openly calling for a change to the government economic and social policies, as well as for launching serious fight against poverty.

In the budget for this year, 3.3 million euros have been allocated for measures for fighting poverty. Compared to the 200 million euros which all current estimates reveal is the real cost of the pompus “Skopje 2014” theme park, the budget for fighting poverty is insignificant.

The World Bank is continuously offering the country help in reducing the number of the poor. In its report of last month, the World Bank said poverty in FYROM was getting deeper relative to the other countries of the Western Balkans. Only in FYROM, the number of the poor is rising, which conflicts with the official national statistics.

The World Bank said the unemployment rate as an indicator of poverty is not going to climb down as long as the FYROM’s economy grows at a rate of below 6 percent yearly.