ABSTRACT
The impact on the social structure of the processes described previously has been so great that a new type of society has been formed. To give some idea of the extent of the changes that have taken place, we focus on five specific areas. Our hope is that this approach will provide a general picture of the new Argentine society that has emerged. First we examine the fate during the 1990s of the more or less homogeneous group of the “structurally poor,” who had lived below the poverty line for a long time. Next we analyze two significant transformations that occurred in the heterogeneous Argentine middle class: the appearance of a growing category of the “newly impoverished” middle-class Argentines who fell below the poverty line, and the rise up the social scale of a much smaller sector of the same middle class. We then examine the impact of the increase in unemployment on the society at large. And finally we describe a new phenomenon in Argentina: the emergence of a sector of the population on the periphery of the working world that manages to survive by combining legal and illegal activities.
