Marcos’ poverty reduction claims highly dubious
Poverty may have even worsened
PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. spent an hour and a half delivering his State of the Nation Address (SONA), rattling off so many details we don’t really care about nor have the capacity to cross-check their veracity. However, he uttered only 84 words, or 1 percent of his 9,035-word-long speech, about a topic that is the main concern of Filipinos: poverty.
I suspect he was not really keen on discussing poverty as he knew that he had done very little — if at all — to reduce poverty. Still, though, he boasted: “We have lifted nearly two-and-a-half-million Filipinos out of poverty.”
Marcos’ claims are extremely dubious that these border on being falsehoods. I question Marcos’ figures not to deprecate his two-year administration so far but to alert him that the rosy economic figures his officials are giving him — such as the trade secretary’s claim that foreign direct investments have a total of $19 billion when in reality the figure is just $3.3 billion — are erroneous, and could lead to complacency in undertaking urgently reforms to boost the economy.
Based on the figures I present (see tables), Marcos did not lift 2.5 million Filipinos out of poverty.
His regime so far could have even pushed 13 million Filipinos into poverty.
Drop
In the first place, the drop in poverty incidence Marcos claims for 2023 was mainly due to the rebound of businesses after the 2019-2020 nationwide lockdowns required to contain the Covid-19 virus. In fact, the economy contracted by a record low of 9 percent in 2020, worse than the 7 percent decline in 1984, during the perfect storm of economic and political crisis that hit us. A more honest president would have said: “We are fortunate that the pandemic has ended, and businesses have gone back, providing jobs that have reduced poverty. But we still have much to do to have our millions of countrymen earn enough to cease being unable to afford the bare necessities of existence.”
Marcos, in the 18 months covered by the poverty-incidence claim, has done nothing that he can point to as lifting 2.5 million Filipinos out of poverty, except his ayudas and bribes given to people to sign the Charter change petition — which at most only 200,000 poor Filipinos received.
Based on the Philippine Statistics Authority’s figures that Marcos used, as of mid-2023, there remain at least 3 million Filipino families who need to crawl out of poverty.
However, the reality may be worse, and poverty may even have worsened under Marcos. This probability is bolstered by the Social Weather Stations survey conducted from June 23 to July 1, which reported a huge 58 percent of Filipino families considering themselves poor, a worsening of the 48 percent that reported they were poor at the beginning of his presidency.
Realistic
The SWS poll is more realistic, conforming more to what we observe in our daily lives, although it is based on extrapolating data from a polled sample of the entire population.
Its 58 percent figure means 16 million Filipino families are poor. The PSA data Marcos used in his speech reported only 3 million families as poor. If the SWS figures are right — 13 million more families have fallen into poverty during Marcos’ term so far.
This huge discrepancy is partly due to the fact that the PSA sets its monthly poverty threshold figure (that is, the amount of earnings below which one would be considered poor) at a ridiculous P100 daily. That is, if you earn P200 daily, you’re not poor, according to the PSA. The SWS national poverty threshold, on the other hand, is P500 daily, a bit below the P610 mandated minimum wage (for non-agriculture), thus increasing the number of Filipinos who are poor.
There is another reason, given by the PSA itself, why the poverty incidence was reduced in 2023. The PSA reported: “The observed decline in poverty incidence from 2021 can be explained by the changes in the poverty threshold and income data from 2021 to 2023. The poverty threshold, which is mainly affected by changes in the prices of food items in the food bundle, increased by 15.3 percent in 2023. On the other hand, the mean per capita income, particularly of the second decile, or families near the poverty threshold, increased by 22.9 percent, which is higher than the increase in the poverty threshold.
These resulted in decreases in the poverty incidence among families at 2.3 percentage points and among the population at 2.6 percentage points in 2023.”
In short, the decrease was a statistical fluke of sorts, as the number of Filipinos in the second-worst poverty decile increased their income.
Based on the PSA explanation, there were 2.5 million Filipinos whose earnings increased past P100, which allowed Marcos to claim that many have been lifted out of poverty based on the ridiculously low P100 daily income threshold. But these did not earn more than P500 daily — the threshold in the SWS computations. The weak economy under Marcos even then pushed millions of Filipinos to suffer a fall in their earnings below P500 — expanding the ranks of the poor in the country to a total of 58 percent.
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Marcos’ poverty reduction claims highly dubious
Source: Breaking News PH
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