Milestone built on sand
The milestone is genuine. But it was built on consumption, remittance, and a bloated services sector, while manufacturing withered.
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The milestone is genuine. But it was built on consumption, remittance, and a bloated services sector, while manufacturing withered.
The numbers are real, and so is the applause they deserve. The poverty incidence fell to 9.7 percent in 2025, down from 15.5 percent in 2023 — 6.5 million Filipinos climbing out of deprivation in two years, the fastest such movement in the country’s history.
Chief economist Arsenio Balisacan calls it a milestone reached ahead of schedule. He is not wrong to say so. But the more practical question, the one that will determine whether this becomes history or headline, is what happens to the family that just barely crossed the line.
To recall, that line sits at P35,121 per person a year — roughly P2,927 a month, or P14,634 for a household of five. That is not comfort. It is the statistical minimum to avoid starvation.
The World Bank’s own estimate should sober up anyone tempted to declare victory: 28 percent of Filipinos live just above that threshold — just one poor harvest, one devastating typhoon away from falling back in.
Without the government’s 4Ps and UPLIFT transfers, nearly two million more would already have slipped back this year alone, undone by an energy price shock that hit the poorest hardest because food, fuel and transport eat up the largest share of what little they have.
So yes, the milestone is genuine. But it was built on consumption, remittance and a bloated services sector, while manufacturing withered. Balisacan himself admits the country never invested seriously in industry.
That is the model now buckling under 2026’s inflation surge and a GDP slowdown severe enough to force economic managers to cut their own growth targets to 3.5–4.5 percent this year.
The upper-middle-income reclassification arrived almost at the same moment the engine sputtered. That is not coincidence; it is a country graduating on paper before building the industrial base to make it stick.
Here is where politics stops being background noise and becomes the story. Ask a near-poor family in Bulacan or Pampanga to trust that their gains will be protected and you are asking them to trust the same DPWH — with the connivance of the crooks in Congress, and who knows where else — that conjured up flood control projects out of thin air while people sat underwater.
You are asking them to trust a Senate that has spent this year litigating a Vice President’s confidential funds instead of legislating an industrial policy Balisacan said the country desperately needs — while a sitting congressman, the son of one of that same chamber’s most senior members, and a decorated senator both stand accused of corruption themselves.
This is not politics-as-usual that can be waved off as noise around the real economic story. It is the real economic story. A state that cannot police its own procurements cannot be trusted to build the flood barriers, the schools, and the factories that will keep the near-poor from becoming the poor again.
Every hearing on ghost projects is also, quietly, a hearing on why no serious manufacturing sector has ever really been developed in this country.
President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. and Balisacan know what need to be done: control inflation, protect the near-poor, invest in health and education, create better jobs, and finally build the manufacturing base the country skipped.
None of that is complicated as policy. What is missing is the political will to execute it posthaste while half the government’s attention is consumed by scandal management.
The President cannot fix DPWH’s rot with speeches; he needs prosecutions that will stick and contractors that will go to jail, not just get blacklisted. Congress, for its part, owes the country more than an impeachment trial, however necessary — it owes appropriations that survive procurement capture and oversight that does not stop at statements dished out to media.
The uncomfortable truth is that poverty reduction and anti-corruption are not two separate agendas competing for attention. They are the same agenda.
Every peso skimmed from a flood control project is a peso that does not build the flood barrier and drainage system that will keep a near-poor family from slipping below the poverty line again.
The Philippines has proven it can lift millions above a line. What it has not yet proven is that it can stop stealing from the people still standing just above it.
