Competing measures of poverty

My last column, on Self-Rated Poverty as surveyed by Social Weather Stations (SWS), was serendipitously followed by two reports of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) on poverty as measured officially. One PSA report was a national summary, “Proportion of poor families reduced to 6.4 percent in 2025” (8/21/26); the other, with regional details, was “Poverty incidence in all regions declined between 2023 and 2025” (8/26/26).

The SWS and PSA numbers differ tremendously, of course; their measurement systems are very different. Nationwide, in 2026 Q2, Self-Rated Poverty was 49 percent of families—one of two—versus only 6.4 percent of—one of 16—officially poor in calendar year 2025, according to PSA. But let me say from the start that I’m a free-market economist, fundamentally antimonopoly, and pro-competition. Competition in research is good.

Bottom-up versus top-down. SWS does quarterly surveys of how many families (not persons) identify with the simple word mahirap, and how much for monthly home expenses they need so as not to feel that way. This system is bottom-up since it discovers both the poverty rate and the poverty threshold by direct inquiry from families themselves. Mahirap is the simplest Filipino word for Poor; we don’t venture into dukhâ or maralitâ. We don’t try to translate the phrase “struggling to make ends meet,” that American surveys regularly use.

The PSA system is: (a) to set a poverty threshold for family expenses on food and assume a 70:30 split of food: nonfood expenses for the poor, (b) to take the biennial Family Income and Expenditures Survey (FIES), and (c) to estimate, from the FIES survey, how many people (families and persons) have an income—though expenditures would make more sense—short of the threshold. This is an indirect, top-down, system where both the threshold and its affordability are set officially.

The new PSA poverty threshold for the National Capital Region (NCR) in 2025 is P16,842 of monthly income for a five-person family, giving an official poverty incidence of 0.6 percent‚practically zero! The SWS self-rated poverty percentage for NCR averaged 40 in 2025 and 41 in 2026 Q1-Q2, after a 2025 average of 40; the median self-rated poverty threshold for monthly home expenses in NCR was a steady P20,000 from 2024 Q4 to 2026 Q1, and rose to P21,000 in 2026 Q2.

The FIES has limited frequency. It was done for reference years 1985, 1988, 1991, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2021, 2023, 2025, or only 15 times so far. It was triennial in 1985-2021, and upgraded to biennial in 2023. Note that 2024 is a missing year for FIES and hence for official poverty. If the next reference year is 2027, its results are not expected until August 2028, under the next administration.

Also bear in mind that the official poverty line was lowered in 2011 by the PSA’s predecessor, the National Statistical Coordination Board, and used to revise the earlier poverty numbers of 1991, 2003, 2006, and 2009 (see my “The lowering of the official poverty line,” 2/12/11). Numbers for all other years were unrevised, reducing the consistent series to only 10 points starting 1991, and drastically lessening the degrees of freedom in testing econometric models for forecasting the poverty rate.

Family income and expenditures are inherently difficult to survey. An FIES questionnaire is extremely long, taking 2+ hours in interview time. Furthermore, it requires two interviews—one in July/August, covering the first half of the reference year, and a second the following January/February, for the second half. This explains why, after data processing, the results for the whole year 2025 are ready only now, half a year later. What makes an FIES truly costly is a gigantic sample size required for granular data at the province and highly urbanized city level. Well, data on income and expenditure are needed for their own sakes and not only for their implications for poverty.

Subjective measurement of poverty and other dimensions of human well-being is inexpensive and practical. The prime example is Self-Rated Poverty (SRP), which has been measured in 155 national surveys so far. It was surveyed in 1983 and 1985, twice a year in 1986-1991, and then quarterly since 1992 (except 2020 when it was only once due to the lockdown). With such complete data, SRP is as amenable to model-building as gross national product.

The post-COVID 19 average yearly SRP rates have been: 2021, 46 percent; 2022, 48 percent; 2023, 48 percent; 2024, 57 percent; 2025, 51 percent; 2026, 50.5 percent (Q1 and Q2 only). This shows that 2024 was a setback for poverty. The SRPs of 2025 were down from 2024, but not as low as in 2023 (see “Persistent poverty,” 1/10/26). Last June, SRP was in the 40s; let’s hope it doesn’t return to the 50s.

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mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.

Mahar Mangahas

Dr Mahar Mangahas is a multi-awarded scholar for his pioneering work in public opinion research in the Philippines and in South East Asia. He founded the now familiar entity, “Social Weather Stations” (SWS) which has been doing public opinion research since 1985 and which has become increasingly influential, nay indispensable, in the conduct of Philippine political life and policy. SWS has been serving the country and policymakers as an independent and timely source of pertinent and credible data on Philippine economic, social and political landscape.