Although income inequality has not varied substantially in Chávez’s time, Venezuela is one of the six countries in Latin America, along with Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Argentina, with the greatest availability and widest distribution of basic services such as education and housing. The Chávez government has also been successful in its efforts to reduce poverty, as the World Bank has acknowledged: since 2000, the percentage of poor households has fallen from 40% to 21%, and the rate of extreme poverty has dropped from 20% to 8%.