First Symposium on Statistics on Gender-based Violence in Puerto Rico

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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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The Puerto Rico Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) for the manufacturing sector was above the threshold, reaching a value of 54.4 in January 2019, with a difference of 7.1 percentage points, compared to the results of December 2018.

This product is intended to measure the short-term conditions of the manufacturing sector in Puerto Rico. The index is a composite of the subscripts for new orders, production, employment, deliveries to suppliers and inventories. For more information, visit the publication history at Puerto Rico Manufacturing - Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) And your Survey where you will see methodological aspects as well as an interactive graph.

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