The state of deprivation

This week, Social Weather Stations released its two prime indicators of the state of deprivation among Filipino families, as of its national survey of June 27-30, 2014. The releases have some of both bad news and good news.

Self-rated poverty is stubborn. On Monday, SWS reported that the proportion of families rating themselves as poor was 55 percent in the Philippines as a whole, at the end of June. It is a slight 2 points above the 53 percent of March 2014. However, the annual average percentages of the quarterly surveys were 52 in 2013, also 52 in 2012, 49 in 2011, and 48 in 2010. The bad news is that the difference between June 2014 and 2010 is not slight. (With quarterly samples of 1,200 households, the combined annual sample of 4,800 households has an error margin below 2 points.)

The records on self-rated poverty (SRP) confirm the story, in the State of the Nation Address that poverty fell from the first semester of 2012 to the first semester of 2013. The SRP percentages of quarters one and two of 2012 were 55 and 51, respectively, or an average of 53 for the full semester, whereas those of 2013Q1 and 2013Q2 were 52 and 49, respectively, or an average of 50.5.

However, the favorable change in official poverty from 2012S1 to 2013S1, already manifest in the SRP records a year ago, was overtaken by the disastrous Supertyphoon “Yolanda” of November 2013. There are no official poverty statistics after 2013S1 as yet. For now, the only statistics on post-Yolanda poverty are the numbers of SRP.

Poverty worsened only in the south. The rise in poverty from March to June this year did not occur in the National Capital Region (NCR), where SRP was stable at 37 percent, nor in the Balance of Luzon, where SRP fell from 51 to 46 percent.

The SRP rates do not reflect exorbitant demands by the people. Half of the poor in NCR say that a monthly home budget of only P12,000 is enough for them not to feel poor any more. Elsewhere in the country, the counterpart threshold is only P10,000. (Note: A home budget excludes work-related expenses like transportation.)

In the Visayas, on the other hand, the SRP percentage rose by 10 points, from 64 to 74—the first time to exceed 70 since 2003. In Mindanao, it rose by 15 points, from 56 to 71. These statistically significant increases outweigh the decline of poverty in the Balance of Luzon. It is clear that income-earning capacities in the south are seriously impaired.

Whether this is still due to the supertyphoon (see my “Poverty, hunger and Yolanda,” Opinion, 1/25/2014), or due to price inflation, brownouts, displacement linked to violence, natural calamities, or other factors, is for regional development experts to establish. What is critical to accept is that the vaunted high growth in Gross Domestic Product has not filtered down to the lowest classes in southern Philippines.

To contest these findings, the government needs its own estimates of poverty by geographical area. Unfortunately, the latest year for official area-estimates is still 2012. No poverty estimates by area were released from the government’s 2013S1 survey (the so-called Annual Poverty Indicators Survey, Apis), on the excuse of inadequate sample size. Going by 2013 experience, if the government has an Apis for 2014S1, then even its national findings will be known only in April next year.

Yet hunger dropped anew. On Wednesday, SWS reported 16.3 percent as the proportion of families experiencing involuntary hunger at least once in the three months before being interviewed in June. Moderate hunger, meaning it happened only once or else a few times, was experienced by 13.5 percent, whereas severe hunger, meaning it was often or always, was experienced by 2.8 percent. (Don’t pay attention to the careless misreporting that SWS defines hunger as having nothing to eat for three months.)

The new hunger rate is 1.5 points below the 17.8 percent of March 2014, which in turn was 0.6 points below the 18.1 percent of December 2013—i.e., there have now been two consecutive quarterly drops in hunger. The annual average hunger percentages of the quarterly surveys were 19.5 in 2013, 19.9 in 2012, also 19.9 in 2011, and 19.1 in 2010. So the latest hunger rate is also below the annual averages of the past four years, which is good news. I think it offsets the bad news on SRP, since suffering from hunger is worse than suffering from poverty.

This is not the first time for a hunger rate and a poverty rate to move in opposite directions in the course of one quarter. Between 2012Q3 and 2012Q4, hunger fell while SRP rose (“Poverty and hunger are dynamic,” Opinion, 1/19/2013). Between 2011Q3 and 2011Q4, hunger rose while SRP fell (“Hunger and poverty are different,” Opinion, 2/04/2012).

The immense number of SWS surveys done on poverty and hunger at the same time have led to the discovery that the hungry are not a fixed proportion of the poor. Hunger among the self-rated poor fell from 27.5 percent in March 2014 to 21.1 percent in June 2014. This is the main reason hunger fell, although SRP rose, from Q1 to Q2.

There are also some hungry among those who do not feel poor, and they are not a fixed proportion either. Their hunger rate rose from 7.1 percent in March to 10.3 percent in June—a relatively small increase, that was outweighed by the fall in hunger among the poor. The measurement system is not inconsistent, since hunger is always greater among the poor than the nonpoor, at the same point in time.

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Contact mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.