Poverty Reduction Requires More

Poverty Reduction Requires More

Indexation of the Minimum Wage Is Not Enough

27 December 2025

It is The Third Day of Christmas, a Saturday. I was surprised to see a newspaper today, as I had assumed the next edition would only appear on Monday, 29 December. In the paper, I read about three Christmas speeches: those of the governor, the king, and the pope. I also saw the speech of the lieutenant governor of Bonaire, and honestly, I found his contribution strong; he clearly named both the problems and the solutions facing Bonaire.

My mood darkened when I came across the article Poverty Requires More, based on a report by the Social and Economic Council (SER) (Antilliaans Dagblad, 2025). All the more so because poverty was once again absent from the governor’s Christmas message. I shared the article on Facebook, adding that I dare to defend the proposition that the SER itself is partly responsible for the persistence of poverty on Curaçao.

Writing this text took me the entire day, not because I doubted my point, but because I searched for the right way to make it clear.

On 23 June 2023, I wrote an article titled Finally Attention for Poverty (Goede, 2023). Until then, hardly anyone spoke about poverty; it effectively did not exist. Anyone without work was dismissed as a layabout. Yet around 30% of the population was already living below the poverty line. I referred to a report by the Central Bureau of Statistics, published in 2019 and based on data from 2016, thus predating the COVID-19 pandemic (CBS, 2019).

In 2024, the SER itself published on poverty and cited the same figure of roughly 30%. This caused considerable turmoil. I received a call from the SER, urgently asking what sources I had used. Notably, I see today that the same CBS report is now included in their own files, as it had already been cited earlier. Above all, the episode illustrates that poverty does not truly resonate within institutions.

On 22 October 2025, again based on CBS data, I wrote that 80–84% of workers earn less than approximately ANG 5,000 per month (Goede, 2025). With ongoing inflation, this means that an increasing number of people reach the end of their salary before the end of the month.

In May 2024, a series of highly complex reports was published on reforms of Curaçao’s social security system (Economisch Bureau Curaçao, 2024). As far as can be observed, nothing has been done with them.

Meanwhile, we are faced with a situation of steadily growing inequality. Young people are leaving the island. The population is ageing rapidly. The old-age pension system (AOV) is structurally unaffordable. Economic growth reinforces inequality rather than reducing it. And the government systematically spends more than budgeted, as once again recently confirmed by the General Audit Office (Nu.cw, 2025).

At the same time, the food bank is forced to beg for resources to help the poorest, even though it has previously been established that part of this situation could have been avoided if the government had not structurally rented properties from family members and friends (Antilliaans Dagblad, 2025a).

And then there are, once again, the men in suits at the SER, producing yet another obligatory report on poverty they do not know. Poverty as an abstract policy issue, detached from the daily reality of people who consistently fall short.

The question is whether this government, these politicians, these state institutions—and also the authors of De prijs van de autonomie (The Price of Autonomy)—are capable of turning the tide. One must be an exceptionally great optimist to believe so.

To illustrate the seriousness of the situation, the SER’s management does not even pay invoices for work already delivered.

Miguel Goede

References (APA)

Antilliaans Dagblad. (2025). Armoede vraagt om meer.

Antilliaans Dagblad. (2025a). Land gooit met huurgeld.

Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek. (2019). Armoede en inkomensverdeling Curaçao.

Economisch Bureau Curaçao. (2024). Aanbevelingen gedaan voor hervormingen in de sociale zekerheid op Curaçao.

Goede, M. (2023, 23 juni). Eindelijk aandacht voor armoede op Curaçao. LinkedIn.

Goede, M. (2025, 22 oktober). Armoede is de norm op Curaçao. LinkedIn.

Nu.cw. (2025, 24 december). Algemene Rekenkamer: begroting 2023 Curaçao fors overschreden.