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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PRESS RELEASE

February 4, 2018

DR. MARIO MARAZZI-SANTIAGO
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

AUTHORIZED STATEMENTS BY THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE OF STATISTICS ON CONGRESSIONAL EXPRESSION AGAINST PROPOSED CONSOLIDATION AND OUTSOURCING

Last Friday, a group of 15 congressional members of the United States House of Representatives, both Republican and Democratic, signed a letter to express their rejection of the provisions on the Institute of Statistics contained in Reorganization Plan No. 1 and its enabling bills, both Senate Bill 809 and House Bill 1403.

In their communication, the congressmen recognize that the Institute of Statistics is a key ally of federal statistical agencies and that, greater collaboration between the Institute and federal statistical agencies, is essential for the Federal Government to produce the same statistics on Puerto Rico, which are already produced for all 50 states of the United States.

We greatly appreciate these expressions and we join them. That's the way it is. The Institute has been working for years, for example, to include the economy of Puerto Rico in statistics on the United States economy. For this reason, the Federal Government has required us to make some improvements to the methodologies used by the Planning Board.

In fact, we are currently the only entity in Puerto Rico that dedicates its own resources, including 10% of our budget, to making these improvements. For this purpose, there are already newly signed interagency agreements between the Institute and the Federal Government. It's just a matter of being allowed to execute them. We are extremely concerned that the proposed reorganization will stop or postpone these important projects, which could undermine the inclusion of Puerto Rico in the United States economy.

We are confident that in the coming days their counterparts in the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico will carefully weigh Reorganization Plan No. 1 and its enabling bills and will also join the call of their peers in the Federal Congress regarding the importance of maintaining an independent Institute of Statistics.

Likewise, we trust that in the coming days more voices will continue to unite and speak out against the proposed reorganization, just as more than 1,700 people have already done through the cyber petition on the change.org platform initiated and promoted by the American Statistical Association.

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Press Contact: Sandra Morales Blanes (787) 688-0401

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STATEMENTS BY DR. MARIO MARAZZI-SANTIAGO, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE REGARDING HIS SELECTION AS A MEMBER OF THE CENSUS SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY COUNCIL ATTACHED TO U.S. CENSUS BUREAU

It is an honor to have been selected in my personal capacity to serve as a member of the Census Scientific Advisory Council. As part of these new functions, we will be advising the Federal Census Bureau on the way to the 2020 Census. We appreciate the trust placed by the acting director of U.S. Census Bureau, Ron Jarmin and the Secretary of Federal Commerce, Wilbur Ross, who have invited, for the first time, a Puerto Rican to be part of this prestigious committee.

Now that the 2020 Census is approaching, so that in the next decade we have the basic information necessary for country decision-making, it is crucial that the planning and execution of a decennial population and housing census take into account the particular circumstances and idiosyncrasies of Puerto Rico.

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Note: For more information about the appointment made by the U.S. Census Bureau and the communication made by the entity can visit the following link: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/csac.html.

Press Contact: Sandra Morales Blanes/787-688-0401

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