Left behind: The poor and hungry

Left behind: The poor and hungry Earlier this year, both the poor and the hungry had a little respite from the economic strains of 2024-2025 that halted the recovery of 2021-2023. My take on the new data on the poor was in “Poverty fell slightly in 2026 Q2” (8/22/26). The new data on the hungry are in “Hunger falls to 20.3% in June 2026 from 23.2% in March 2026,” www.sws.org.ph, 8/24/26. From the first to the second quarter of 2026, i.e., over one quarter, there were significant drops in poverty and hunger at the national level. However, there are so many more data-points to see, besides these two. As of now, Social Weather Stations (SWS) has surveyed Self-Rated Poverty (SRP) 155 times, and hunger 118 times, at the national level. The SRP surveys have been quarterly since 1992, after being done in 1983, in 1985, and twice a year in 1986-1991. The SWS hunger surveys have been quarterly from their start in 1998. The questionnaires have been unchanged; the original raw data are archived for further research. A history lesson: both poverty and hunger are volatile. Between two adjacent surveys, the proportion of the poor changed by less than three percentage points—this being the error margin of a standard SWS national sample—in only one-third of all cases. In the other two-thirds of the cases, where the changes were significant, those downward (falling poverty) outnumbered, slightly, those upward (rising poverty). This shows that the long-term trend in poverty among Filipino families was mostly downward. This is especially true of the prepandemic times up to 2019, to which the poor have not yet recovered (see “Persistent poverty,” 1/10/26). Hunger, on the other hand, has had more cases of insignificant change than poverty. In general, its trend has been flat, i.e., with an equal tendency to rise or to fall over a single quarter’s time. Last June’s 20 percent consisted of about 16 percent of families experiencing hunger (involuntarily) only once or a few times in the past three months, called “moderate” hunger, and 4 percent experiencing it often or always, called “severe.” Note that every point means 270,000 families, given our national base of 27 million per official estimate. Area-wise, the lowest hunger percentage in Q2 is in Balance Luzon (17), followed by the National Capital Region or NCR (21), Visayas (22), and Mindanao (24). The Visayas area had the biggest improvement, a fall of six points, from hunger in Q1. But severe hunger is least in Mindanao (3.3 percent), followed by Visayas (3.7), Balance Luzon (4.3), and NCR (8.3). The great disadvantage in NCR families is the incapability of home-production of food. History-wise, the peak quarterly hunger was 31 percent in September 2020; that year, the annual average reached 20 percent for the first time. It subsided to the teens in 2021-2023, but was at 20 again in 2024 and 2025. Hunger and poverty are related, but not rigidly so. Some non-mahirap families also go hungry, though at a rate less than the mahirap. Hunger in 2026 Q2 fell from 2026 Q1 because of both a fall in poverty and falls in the hungriness of the poor and the nonpoor. The 2026 average is bound to be 20 percent or more, unless the SWS surveys of Q3 and Q4 find improvement. What makes poverty and hunger fall over time? Answering this question requires econometric study of candidate explanatory variables which could be meaningfully associated with poverty and hunger. To my knowledge, the highly significant determinant is the rate of inflation in the cost of living, especially the cost of food. The second-best determinant is the rate of unemployment, which is also significant. Only third-best is the aggregate growth rate of the economy, as measured by the gross national product (GNP) per capita in real terms. More GNP does reduce economic deprivation, but lacks statistical significance. A basic principle in statistical testing is that significance increases with sample size. For testing a time-series model, the sample size is the number of observations over time; the number of interviews that were the basis of each observation is irrelevant. GNP is collected quarterly by government, and the number of its observations is obviously plentiful. On the other hand, the quarterly observations of poverty and hunger in the series of SWS are equally plentiful, precisely because they aim to compete with GNP for public attention. Since per capita GNP has almost always been growing, why have the poor and hungry been left behind? Well, division of the total production by the total population only equals each person’s theoretical share if production is equally shared by everyone—which is untrue and apparently getting ever farther away from the truth. —————– mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.