Peru - Facts and Figures
- Population: 29,849,303 (July 2013 est.)
- Age Structure:
0-14 years: 27.6% (male 4,197,698/female 4,053,852)
25-54 years: 39.2% (male 5,633,249/female 6,056,017)
55-64 years: 7.1% (male 1,039,975/female 1,086,428)
65 years and over: 6.7% (male 947,349/female 1,048,601) (2013 est.)
- Education Expenditures: 2.6% of GDP (2011)
- School Life Expectancy (primary to tertiary):
- Literacy: definition- age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 89.6%
female: 84.6% (2007 est.)
(World Factbook, accessed 12/15/2013)
Economy
- In the 2000s, GDP per capita (on a purchasing-power parity basis) rose from $5,067 in 2000 to $8,606 in 2008, reaching $8,626 in 2009 and an estimated $9,281 in 2010.
- The Human Development Index 2010 ranked Peru 63rd out of 169 states, with an index value of 0.723 (compared to an average of 0.624 for the world and 0.704 for Latin American countries).
- From 54.7% in 2001, the overall poverty rate declined to 36.2% in 2008 and 34.8% in 2009. It is estimated to have declined further in 2010, to 31%. However, the incidence of extreme poverty has not kept pace. It declined from 17.4% in 2005 to 12.6% in 2008 and 11.5% in 2009. Data for 2009 from the National Institute of Statistics (INEI) showed that poverty was lowest and had been most reduced in the coastal region (19.1%), while it remained very pronounced in the Andes region (53.4%) and in the Selva (46.0%), where it even increased in 2009. Out of the country’s 24 departments, widespread poverty as a structural impediment to socioeconomic progress was still very pronounced in the departments of Huancavelica (77.2%), Apurímac (70.3%), Huánuco (64.5%), Ayacucho (62.6%) and Puno (60.8%). While the incidence of extreme poverty in urban areas declined to 2.8%, it still affects 27.8% of the population in rural areas in the interior, where the mostly indigenous population lives on a subsistence economy.
Language
In the 1930’s and 1940’s Quechua and Aymara were officially recognized and used in the initial years of primary school (Perez, 2009).
Peru has three regions; the largely underdeveloped Amazonian lowlands, the Andean are with an agricultural economy and the highly urbanized and developed coastal strip. (van den Berghe, 1978). The further you move from the coast the less developed the regions become and the concentration of indigenous languages increase