A certain occupant of the Palace by the Pasig River couldn’t wait to crow about a shiny new label from Washington: upper middle-income country, they called it, the first time since the Marcos Sr. years. The chief executive practically took a victory lap, crediting four years of “effective” economic policies for finally lifting the country out of the lower middle-income bracket it had occupied since 1987.

Nosy Tarsee’s spies, however, went digging — and the confetti didn’t survive contact with the numbers.

For starters, the timing is awkward. First-quarter growth this year clocked in at 2.8 percent, down from 3 percent the previous quarter, and nowhere near the 6-percent-plus pace boosters insist a genuinely thriving economy should be posting.

One banking insider we tapped — a former Bangko Sentral investor relations hand, no less — had a blunt Tagalog word for the whole exercise: ampaw. Big and puffy on the outside, hollow inside. The World Bank’s formula, she noted, simply divides gross national income by population — a threshold so low it barely clears daily-wage territory once you do the math for an average family.

The hollowness shows in the underlying rot. Investment is actually shrinking —negative 3.3 percent this year, compared with double-digit growth in 2021 and 2022.

Unemployment is hovering near 4 percent, but underemployment is approaching 15 percent, meaning millions are working fewer hours than they want or earning less than they need.

Inflation, meanwhile, has climbed as high as 7 percent, which our source described as a textbook case of stagflation — sluggish growth paired with rising prices, the worst of both worlds.

A March social survey found that more than half of Filipino families — more than 14 million households — still consider themselves poor. Funny kind of upper middle-income glow.

Then there’s the peso, now worth roughly 73 centavos against its 2018 value, meaning a supposed P1-million income now buys goods worth only about P730,000. Add credit-rating agencies maintaining negative outlooks, multilateral lenders trimming growth forecasts, and at least one Asian nation reportedly balking at extending fresh loans because of poor project performance—not exactly a ringing vote of confidence to accompany the medal.

Nosy Tarsee’s source pinned much of the leakage on the usual suspect: the flood control corruption scandal still winding its way through Congress and the Office of the Ombudsman, with no convictions yet despite allegations that trillions of pesos were siphoned from public works.

Money that should have built roads and created jobs, she said, instead built billionaires.

With roughly a year and a half left in the administration and unfinished infrastructure projects piling up, Nosy Tarsee’s source offered one final verdict on the upper middle-income celebration: pretty to hear, hollow once you crack it open.