The exchange-rate and financial peace promoted by Javier Milei’s government is not trickling down, and the real economy continues to show tensions in various social and productive indicators. The supposed aggregate growth is not translating into widespread improvement in household economic conditions. The Congressional Family Vulnerability Index (IVFC) reached 5.3 points in March, the third worst record since the libertarian government took office, and completed eleven consecutive months of increase. The measurement falls within the stage called «Family Fragility,» a category where households no longer have sufficient surpluses to absorb economic contingencies without affecting consumption, debt, or financial compliance capacity.
The increase in social fragility was 0.2 points compared to February and 1.4 points compared to the same month last year. The document states that the result was driven mainly by the monthly increase in inflation, followed by the growth in delinquency and the decline in the productive structure and formal employment. The report suggests that the March data «consolidates a stage of persistent fragility in household conditions, which began after the 2025 legislative elections.» The IVFC was designed as a synthetic indicator to measure family economic well-being based on five dimensions: Federal CPI, real income, formal private salaried employment, dynamics of registered employer companies, and household delinquency.
The methodology establishes a scale from one to ten: lower values represent a robust family economic situation, while an increase in the score expresses higher levels of vulnerability. «The indicator reflects the persistence of structural tensions, resulting from a combination of adverse factors that include inflation that continues to pressure the cost of living, the sustained destruction of formal private salaried employment, the reduction of purchasing power of income, and a significant increase in household delinquency,» the document warns.
One of the central arguments of the report prepared by Congress is that the economic growth recorded during 2025 did not translate into equivalent improvements in the labor market or income. The document recalls that, after the contraction of GDP in 2024, the economy grew 4.4% year-on-year in 2025, but maintains that the impulse was concentrated in activities with low labor demand. «2025 was the first year in the last three decades in which the economy grew, but that growth was not reflected in the creation of new formal jobs,» the document points out.
The report attributes this behavior to a recovery led by sectors such as mining, agriculture, and financial intermediation, activities that have a more limited capacity to absorb labor compared to other industrial branches or employment-intensive services. The document diagnoses that the evolution of GDP is no longer sufficient to describe the social impact of the economic scheme and raises the need to incorporate indicators related to production, employment, and income.
Another of the variables surveyed, and one of those that had the most impact on the result, was the deterioration of formal private salaried employment. According to the report, 7,603 registered jobs were destroyed in March. The year-on-year comparison shows a reduction of 98,856 formal private jobs compared to March 2025. The cumulative data since November 2023 raises the loss to 216,643 jobs. The report highlights that in only 9 of the 29 months since the start of the current administration was there net creation of formal private employment.
The labor dynamic appears as one of the factors explaining the sustained increase in the index because it directly impacts current income, consumption capacity, and financial compliance. This data is complemented by the destruction of the business network: during March, 2,011 productive units closed compared to the previous month, and the loss since November 2023 accumulates a balance of 26,448 disappeared employer companies. The document notes that in February a sequence of 23 consecutive months of productive unit closures had been interrupted, although that trend reappeared in March. The total number of active productive units stood at 485,900, levels comparable to those observed at the end of the pandemic.
The index also incorporates the evolution of real wages since Milei took office. Between November 2023 and March 2026, the purchasing power of registered wages fell by 9.2 points, while compared to March last year, it showed a real reduction of 3.2 percentage points. The report identifies three stages: the first corresponds to the initial impact of the December 2023 devaluation; the second, to a recovery associated with a slowdown in nominality; and the third, starting from August 2025, marked by a new fall in real wages. The document states that «of the accumulated loss of purchasing power between December 2023 and March 2026 (-9.2 p.p.), 56% occurred in the first year of administration.» It also projects continuity of this dynamic due to the combination of wage agreements below price increases and inflation that maintains monthly records above 2%.
The report adds that, if the Federal CPI is used as a reference to measure inflation, the accumulated fall in real wages amounts to 14.2 percentage points. This is where the methodological discussion on inflation measurement comes into play, following the government’s decision not to update the basket used for price measurement, which is reflected in the difference between the Federal CPI and the official INDEC index. For March, the Federal CPI registered a monthly increase of 3.2% and a year-on-year variation of 33.5%.
The last variable taken into account by the Congressional calculation is household indebtedness and difficulties in meeting payment obligations, in a context of loss of purchasing power, rising interest rates, and use of credit to cover current expenses. The report indicates that in March, the non-performing household credit portfolio reached 11.5%, the highest level since the start of the Central Bank series in 2010. Furthermore, this record occurred after sixteen consecutive months of increases. In just one year, delinquency soared by 8.3 percentage points. For the report, the growth in delinquency expresses a deterioration that is no longer limited to employment or income but is beginning to shift toward the effective capacity to sustain current payments and financial obligations.
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