Low educational attainment has helped to perpetuate income inequality and poverty by preventing the poor from taking advantage of opportunities created by growth. It is important to note that more than 60 percent of Brazil's poor live in the North-East of the country. In Argentina poverty rates, as measured by the national poverty line, have grown since 1995, after falling from 40 percent in 1990 to a low of 22 percent in 1994. Income distribution has also deteriorated, reflecting the fact that the gains of economic growth have gone largely to the more skilled and educated in the labor force, and not to the poor. In addition, unemployment has risen, and unemployment rates are higher among the poor and the extreme poor.
Poverty appears high among the indigenous groups.
At a regional level, income inequality increased between 1986 and 1989, but stabilized thereafter, at least until 1996. Mexico and Brazil followed this trend, while Chile and Paraguay faced increasing inequality throughout the 1990s. Worryingly, in Argentina enrollment rates at the secondary and tertiary levels have decreased between 1992 and 1997 for the poorest 20 percent of the population. The macroeconomic shocks that hit many Latin American countries have disastrous consequences for poverty. The 1995 Tequila Crisis in Mexico, for example, resulted in a 7 percent increase in poverty.