Epic disconnect
The gap between what a family needs and what the government considers acceptable to pay them is a canyon with a press release taped over it.
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The gap between what a family needs and what the government considers acceptable to pay them is a canyon with a press release taped over it.
The Palace seems to believe that Filipinos were all born yesterday when it pushes its claim that poverty in the Philippines has fallen to a single digit for the first time in the nation’s history, at 9.7 percent.
Here is how the government wants the story told: Poverty incidence among families fell to 6.4 percent, or 1.90 million families, the first single-digit reading on record. At the individual level, poverty fell to 9.7 percent, or roughly 11.08 million Filipinos supposedly lifted from penury.
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) attributed the decline to incomes outpacing the poverty threshold. The agency, however, did not release a full report.
Instead, it issued a press release with a table, but no methodology paper to scrutinize, no detailed breakdown to examine, and no basis to compare the figures against the past three years of what Filipinos actually experienced while trying to make ends meet.
As Sonny Africa of IBON Foundation noted, dryly and correctly, the official poverty threshold is built on a bare-minimum, least-cost food basket, with non-food needs barely costed at all.
If that threshold was still something close to the P91-a-day figure used in 2023, then the government isn’t measuring poverty but how cheap you can make survival sound on paper.
That is stagecraft, timed for a government heading into pre-election 2027 with a public approval rating that needs a lot of cheering up. Nothing would be better than a chart showing that people experiencing poverty are disappearing.
The timing could not be more absurd. The record poverty claim landed the same month the PSA itself reported that GDP growth had collapsed to 2.3 percent in the second quarter, the weakest reading since the pandemic, down from 2.8 percent in the first quarter and a full 5.5 percent a year earlier.
Industry contracted. Public construction, still reeling from last year’s flood control corruption scandal, plunged. Household consumption, the engine of growth for so long, grew at its weakest non-pandemic pace in 16 years.
This is the backdrop against which the government wants Filipinos to believe poverty just posted a historic decline. An economy limping to its slowest growth since 2009 — and somehow the poor got richer in the middle of it.
The Middle East conflict sent oil prices climbing and pulled fuel, transport and electricity costs up with it, feeding an inflation rate that averaged 5 percent over the first seven months of the year, well above the government’s own 3 percent target.
Remittances slowed. Jobs tied to trade and energy-sensitive sectors wobbled. Somehow, that same global oil shock that dented growth, spiked prices and rattled household budgets left poverty numbers not just intact, but improved.
The government wants both stories to be true at once: The economy is struggling because of forces beyond its control and poverty is falling because of policies within its control. It is a paradox straight out of the Twilight Zone.
Inflation, at 6.4 percent in July, tops only Laos in Southeast Asia but is worse than Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Timor-Leste. Against all that, the minimum wage moved by a mere P31, from P481 to P512. IBON pegs a livable daily wage for a family of five at P1,277, for a family of six at P1,533.
Do the math that the PSA won’t, as the gap between what a family needs and what the government considers acceptable to pay them is a canyon with a press release taped over it.
The safety net meant to mitigate Filipinos’ suffering is a lineup of ayuda that the government claims reached 2.7 million beneficiaries, compared with IBON’s estimate of 21 million households vulnerable to the cost-of-living crisis.
The one-time handouts, P3,000 to P5,000 and P1,500 for fuel, do not last a week to soothe the tortured souls of Filipinos.
The poor did not get richer, but the government just got better at statistical sleight of hand.
