The pauperization names the impoverishment of an area or population. The term comes from pauperizing, which refers to this process that leads a person or a group of individuals to become increasingly poor.
Before proceeding with the definition of the concept, it is important to be clear about what poverty is. This notion mentions the lack of means to achieve the satisfaction of elementary needs. It is generally linked to material needs and means, although poverty can also be spoken of in a symbolic sense.
When we refer to pauperization, therefore, we are talking about a process that, for various reasons, causes a human group to lose a standard of living that it had reached, which is produced by the lack of access to resources with which before it counted. Pauperization, in other words, implies becoming poorer.
For a few years now we can say that in many countries there has been a process of impoverishment. And it is that the latent economic crisis has caused many citizens to find themselves without work, without a house and without financial aid that allows them to live even in a humble way.
Spain is a country that is a faithful reflection of that situation. Thus, there has been a palpable increase in the number of citizens who are unemployed, also those who have lost their homes due to not being able to pay the mortgage and even those who have had to close their companies because they no longer generated profits but simply debts.
Of course, without overlooking either that many are the people who are living one of the most difficult stages of their life. And it is that having nothing, neither work nor house, they have been forced to have to go to the street, where they sleep and where they ask for money to be able to put some food in their mouth.
Suppose that, in 2000, a community had an unemployment rate of 5%. The inhabitants of this group had an average income of 5,000 pesos. In 2010, on the other hand, unemployment had grown to 26% and the average income, dropped to 2,900 pesos. Against this background, it can be indicated that the community in question suffered a process of impoverishment.
Pauperization is generally associated with the conditions of the economy: the level of employment, wages, inflation, etc. Public services (availability of hospitals, access to schools) and, on occasions, even natural conditions (a drought can cause the impoverishment of a town, as can floods or a tsunami) also have an impact.
In addition to all the above, we cannot ignore the existence of what has been called the theory of pauperization. It was developed by the Egyptian economist Samir Amin (1931) and it goes on to say that what capitalism does is to concentrate wealth in certain parts of the planet. A situation that translates into a notable increase in the lower classes compared to the middle and upper classes.
In the same way that theory comes to expose that other consequences are a forceful drop in wages, until they remain stagnant in subsistence wages, and a worsening of the so-called social polarization.