Arete Volume 3

Αρετή (Arete) Journal of Excellence in Global Leadership | Vol. 3 No. 1 | 2025

access to basic utility services, roads system expansion, etc. Data from Paraguay’s National Institute of Statistics (INE, 2023) reveals that access to sewage, water and electricity in Paraguay respectively increased from 59.3%, 60.7% and 90.6% in 2000 to 89.5%, 91.2% and 99.7% in 2021. As for national paved roads, this indicator went up dramatically from only 3,886 kilometers in 2003 to over 12,000 as of June 2023. Indeed, physical investment undertaken by the central government has raised from only 1.9% of GDP on average during 2003-2011 to over 3.1% in the period 2019-2022 (MoF, 2023-c). A larger investment from 2020 onwards is also explained however by counter-cyclical measures and public health strengthening due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As could be expected from several years of economic growth, poverty and inequality indicators have improved substantially in the last several decades. According to Paraguay’s National Institute of Statistics (INE), poverty was in fact cut by almost half between 2002 and 2022, hence attaining a lower poverty than many countries in South America (see Figure 4). While less evident to the naked eye, the degree of inequality as reflected by the income Gini coefficient (i.e. a statistical measure of income inequality by summarizing the distribution of income across a population) did ameliorate during the same time period from 0.57 in 2002 to 0.45 in 2022, producing an even sharper decline than other emerging countries like Brazil or Colombia (see Figure 5). Figure 4 Poverty Headcount Ratio at National Poverty Lines (% of population, period 2002 2022)

Note . Adapted from the World Development Indicators (WDI), World Bank Group.

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