Hunger and joblessness subside

“Hunger trend snapped” and “Sharp drop in joblessness rate” were the headlines of BusinessWorld on Tuesday and Friday this week, reporting on results of the Social Weather Survey for the second quarter of 2012.

The first item was about the drop in hunger to 18.4 percent of families in the survey of May 24-17, from the record-high 23.8 percent in the first-quarter survey of March 10-13. The second was on the drop in adult joblessness to 28.6 percent in May, from the record-high 34.4 percent in March. These welcome new findings are consistent with the quarterly drop in self-rated poverty among families, released a week ago.

Meaningfulness to wellbeing. The improvements in poverty, hunger and joblessness are more meaningful to the wellbeing of the Filipino people than the recent increases in stock market prices, the dollar value of the peso, and the credit ratings of foreign agencies for the Philippines—which only apply, respectively, to those who own stocks traded on the exchange, to those with import-dependent lifestyles, and to the financial health of the government.

Neither was the high first-quarter growth in Gross National Product very meaningful, in itself.  Historically, the relation of reduction in poverty and hunger to GNP-growth is very low, although positive.  What matter are certain components of GNP, specifically agricultural production and government expenditures, which affect poverty and hunger with a one-quarter lag, according to research on the SWS quarterly data by Dr. Dennis Mapa of the University of the Philippines School of Statistics.

Quarterly change in hunger. The last time that the hunger percentage was less than 20 was 2011Q2, when it was 15.1. Then it rose in three consecutive quarters, to 21.5 in 2011Q3,  22.5 in 2011Q4, and the said 23.8 in 2012Q1.

The new decline by 5.4 percentage points is significant statistically (20 percent hunger has a error margin of only +/- 2.3 percent; the standard margin of +/- 3 percent applies to 50 percent hunger) as well as numerically (one million families).

This is not the first time for hunger to change (downward or upward) by as much as five points in a quarter.  This has implications, for instance, for a policy of government-controlled buffer stocks of food.

It would not have been possible to know hunger’s volatility, were it not for surveying it on a quarterly basis. I strongly recommend that the government include hunger—and why not poverty, too?—in any of its quarterly national surveys, so as to see the volatility for itself.

The volatility is explainable by determinants that are likewise volatile, such as inflation in food prices in particular, and the cost of living in general, as Dr. Mapa’s research shows. He finds that underemployment and unemployment, apart from being wellbeing indicators themselves, also have a lagged impact on poverty and hunger. Variability in meteorological weather also matters, of course.

Annual change in hunger. One favorable quarterly change does not make a trend. To abstract from the quarterly movements in hunger, let us review its averages from year to year, as shown in the SWS hunger report, on www.sws.org.ph.

In the first six years that SWS surveyed hunger, the annual average percentages were: 11.0 in 1998, 8.3 in 1999, 10.8 in 2000, 11.4 in 2001, 10.1 in 2002, and 7.0 in 2003.  Only now can we appreciate how mild hunger was then, with the record-low 5.1 being in September 2003.

Afterwards, the annual hunger percentages grew steadily almost every year: 11.8 in 2004, 14.3 in 2005, 16.7 in 2006, 17.9 in 2007, 18.5 in 2008, 19.1 in 2009, 19.1 again in 2010, and 19.9 in 2011. Research is urgently needed to explain why hunger was so mild during 1998 to 2003, but then surged upward since 2004.

The two surveys done for 2012 so far—with 23.8 percent in the first quarter, and 18.4 percent in the second—have an average hunger of 21.1 percent. Before saying that the hunger trend has “snapped,” I would like to see hunger decline in the third and fourth quarters, sufficient to put the 2012 average below 19 percent, i.e. below the averages of 2010 and 2011.

Joblessness versus not-having-worked. SWS is now taking care to describe its statistic as “joblessness,” to distinguish it better from the official concept, which considers respondents who worked for at least one hour in the week before interview as “employed.”

In “Philippines Quarterly Update: From stability to prosperity for all,” March 2012, page 5, figure 6: “Differences in measuring unemployment suggest a range of notion [sic] of what being employed really means,”  the World Bank Office Manila shows that adding the proportion employed for not more than five hours per day to the official proportion of unemployed will roughly match the SWS rates of joblessness.

My column “Is 1 hour a week a ‘job’?” (Inquirer, 5/26/2012), gave the SWS survey questions in Filipino, with an English translation which is for reference and not actually asked.  In forthcoming surveys, SWS will maintain the Filipino, but improve the English, as follows:

1. Kayo po ba ay may trabaho sa kasalukuyan, walang trabaho ngayon pero mayroon dati, o hindi pa nagtrabaho kahit minsan? Do you have a job at present, no job now but had one before, or have you never had a job?

2. [For the jobless] Kayo po ba ay naghahanap ng trabaho o nagbabalak magtayo ng negosyo, o hindi? Are you looking for a job or planning to set up a business, or not?

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Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or [email protected].