The latest Pulse Asia Survey on the performance of the Marcos administration shows there are two key issues in which the public perceives the government is doing poorly: control of inflation (31 percent) and poverty reduction (39 percent).

Unsurprisingly, these two key issues have now become central communication themes on the political battlefield.

(I will limit the discussion on controlling inflation in today's issue.)

Verily, it's unfair to attribute the rise in the inflation rate to President Bongbong Marcos. The rise in the inflation rate, as financial and economic experts, have suggested, is a confluence of external and internal events and policies, such as the war in Ukraine causing oil prices to rise; the strength of the US dollar; disruption of the global supply chain by the pandemic; and the damage to crops by the recent typhoons.

Also, it is too early to judge the way the President is managing the economy. As far as international financial organizations are concerned, Philippine economic growth remains robust. The recent economic outlook by the Asian Development Bank for the Philippine economy remains buoyant maintaining its forecast of 6.5 percent GDP growth for 2022. ADB also reported that the normalization of socioeconomic activity will place the Philippine economy to steady growth at pre-pandemic levels.

However, it does not help that the type of inflation we are currently experiencing is driven mainly by high food and utility prices, which constitute a huge pie of the total household budget. Kantar, a marketing and data analytics organization, recently released a study indicating that a typical Filipino household spends about half of its monthly budget on food, utilities, and transportation. I have no statistics on the economic profile of the 2,000 household respondents of the said study but it is safe to assume, by applying the relationship of food share in household expenditure (Engel's Law), that the expenditure share in food, utilities, and transport is much higher than 50 percent in classes D and E where votes are highly concentrated. This is the main reason why the president scored badly on the issue of controlling inflation.

As expected, Albay 1st District Rep. Edcel Lagman, now Liberal Party president, was quick to assert that the economy has worsened under the Marcos Administration as the inflation rate rose from 6.1 percent since the president assumed office to 6.9 percent in September.