Social Climate
Admitting that poverty can rise
By Mahar Mangahas
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:03:00 03/08/2008
MANILA, Philippines -- “Poverty worsens between 2003 and 2006” is the title of the press release issued by the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) last Wednesday, March 5. It took five months for the government to confirm what was already plain as day in the summary tables of the 2006 Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), publicly released by the National Statistics Office (NSO) on Oct. 9 last year.
My Oct. 20, 2007 Inquirer column, “GNP rose but incomes fell,” pointed to the NSO findings that: (a) average annual income per family, corrected for inflation, fell from P148,000 in 2003 to P144,000 in 2006; and (b) spending on food by the poorest 30 percent of families rose from 48 percent of their expenditures in 2003 to 59 percent of the same in 2006. Thus FIES-watchers understood that poverty worsened between 2003 and 2006, even though the NSO did not present poverty statistics.
The official responsibility for computing poverty lies not with the NSO but with the NSCB, which makes the official poverty lines. Why couldn’t the NSCB have computed for poverty immediately, since on March 2, 2007 it had already publicly released preliminary poverty lines for 2006 and 2007 for every province? Applying the national-average NSCB poverty line to the FIES tables, I made a quickie estimate that the poverty percentage, as officially defined, rose from 25 in 2003 to about 30 in 2006. So my Inquirer column of Oct. 27, 2007 asked, “Does NSCB have the guts to ever report that poverty got worse?”
Well, after five months, the NSCB finally found the guts to do so. Its 2006 poverty line for a family of five is P6,274 per month, as a national average. The NSCB says that, from 2003 to 2006, the national percentage of poor families rose from 24.4 to 26.9, and the absolute number of poor families grew from 4.0 million to 4.7 million.
Even official poverty can move opposite to GNP. This is the very first time for the government to even admit the possibility that poverty can grow. It has measured poverty only eight times, namely in 1985, 1988, 1991, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2003, and 2006. The first seven measurements gave a picture of slowly, but steadily, declining poverty, leading to the comfortable assumption that growth in the Gross National Product always benefits the poor. That assumption has now been proven to be no better than wishful thinking. It is now more productive to criticize that assumption than to criticize, all of a sudden, how GNP and/or poverty are being officially measured.
For the past two decades, the government’s policy has been to measure poverty only once every three years. To me that is like a person having a general medical checkup only every three years instead of every year. The next scheduled FIES is in 2009, which implies that the next official reading of poverty might be publicly released by October 2010, if the NSCB works with the NSO as a team, or else by March 2011, if the NSCB again needs five extra months to do its computations. To me that is like a man who discovers a serious medical problem from a triennial checkup, and then thinks that it is safe to again wait three years before the next checkup, plus five more months to get the laboratory results.
In the meantime, analysts of National Economic and Development Authority, the World Bank, and ADB should stop making synthetic annual estimates of Philippine poverty on the basis of some “historical elasticity” of poverty to the GNP. It is not the sheer size of the GNP that matters, but the extent to which it is shared with the poor.
The study of poverty should be based on all available data, and not be limited to official data. The newly released NSCB report on official poverty refers to 2006, or two years ago. Since that time, the poll group Social Weather Stations (SWS) has issued four quarterly reports on its key alternative indicators of Self-rated Poverty and Hunger for 2007.
The NSCB time-picture of poverty falling over 2000-2003 and then rising over 2003-2006 fits very well with Hunger, and fits partially with Self-rated Poverty. Here are the simple annual averages of the SWS quarterly figures:
Hunger Self-rated Poverty
2000 10.8% 56.5%
2001 11.4% 62.0%
2002 10.1% 62.8%
2003 7.0% 59.5%
2004 11.8% 51.2%
2005 14.3% 52.8%
2006 16.7% 54.2%
2007 17.8% 49.5%
Thus 2003 was also a low point for hunger, but the suffering expanded steadily over the next four years, in fact reaching a record-high 21.5 percent in September 2007 before subsiding somewhat to 16.2 percent in December 2007.
In the case of Self-rated Poverty, the low point was in 2004 rather than in 2003. It then increased into 2005 and 2006, before dropping, thankfully, below 50 percent in 2007. In reporting this in the SWS Annual Survey Review last January, I said that the economic growth of 2007 did not help those in deepest suffering, i.e., the hungry, but only trickled down to the marginal poor, i.e., those on the border of feeling “mahirap” [poor]. I am not uncomfortable with the 2007 SWS data showing a rise in hunger together with a fall in Self-rated Poverty. These indicators are not identical, and are separately useful. I do not assume a fixed elasticity between them.
The SWS maintains that its procedures for measuring economic suffering are valid, but does not claim that they are more accurate than the official ones, for any single point in time. They were specifically designed for rapid and frequent reporting over time. Any anti-poverty program that uses only official figures is flying blind in two out of every three years.
* * *
Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph
|
