Author: Alejandro López Flores and Ronald G. Hernández Maldonado

Date: November 6, 2025

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Poverty must be contextualized with social variables to understand and address it effectively. The Backwardness Index for Puerto Rico is an indicator composed of five variables that comprise two dimensions: Economic Mobility and Demography. This index seeks to measure poverty beyond income thresholds, and to incorporate elements of social backwardness and relative deprivation. An exploratory factor analysis was carried out on a set of variables to validate the construction of the multidimensional deprivation model, and to retain the variables that best captured the phenomenon of deprivation. Then, the retained variables were normalized using thresholds. The thresholds were obtained with data from the Puerto Rico Community Survey (ECPR or PRCS in English) and the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS in English). The scores of the different variables were aggregated by dimension, using the arithmetic mean, and the scores resulting from the dimensions were aggregated using the geometric mean. The values of the index lie between 0 and 1 where, the higher the score, the worse the result of the phenomenon.42 municipalities showed a decrease in their index score between the periods compared. Of these 42 municipalities, 22 showed a decrease in their score greater than 5%. Likewise, there are concentrations of municipalities with high Lagging Index scores in the central-southwest and southeastern areas of Puerto Rico.

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UNESCO experts visit Puerto Rico to provide technical assistance to determine how much Puerto Rico invests in education and to compare at the international level

The Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico issues a favorable opinion on the fiscal operations of the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics

“The tests carried out and the evidence in our possession revealed that the operations of the Institute subject to this Report were carried out, in all significant respects, in accordance with applicable law and regulations.”

“The Report comments that since the Institute of Statistics was created in 2003, the Legislature has not allocated the budget for the special fund contrary to Law 209-2003 which establishes an allocation of $2,000,000 as an initial item to finance projects for methodological improvements or statistical products. As of May 28, 2021, the Institute had not received the allocation for the special fund.”

“This situation prevented the Institute from updating Puerto Rico's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) methodology. This measurement of GDP is necessary for the Federal Government to integrate the measurement of Puerto Rico's economy, as required by the Report by the President's Task Force on Puerto Rico's Status of March 11, 2011 under the presidency of Barack Obama.”

Source:

AUDIT REPORT DA-22-06

More information at:

https://www.ocpr.gov.pr/... /auditor-report-of-22... /

#estadisticaspr

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