The Philippine Statistics Authority has given us some very good news. Poverty incidence fell to a record-low 9.7 percent in 2025 from 15.5 percent in 2023, which supposedly means some 6.5 million Filipinos were lifted out of poverty in just two years.
Congratulations, you’re no longer poor.
If you’re still having trouble paying the rent, electricity bill, tuition, groceries, medicine and transportation, don’t be confused. You may feel poor, but statistically you may no longer be one.
I am not saying the PSA cooked the numbers. It uses an established methodology that predates this administration, and we need statistics to know where we are and whether policies are working. But there is a considerable distance between saying poverty incidence fell to 9.7 percent and declaring that 6.5 million Filipinos were ‘lifted out of poverty.’
The latter makes it sound as if millions of families found decent jobs, began earning decent wages, put something away in the bank and finally acquired enough financial security not to panic when the Meralco bill arrives or somebody gets sick.
That isn’t what the statistic says. It says 6.5 million fewer Filipinos fell below the official poverty threshold in 2025 than in 2023.
IBON Foundation, in questioning the 2023 poverty figures, pointed out that the national average poverty threshold worked out to about ?91 per person per day. Of that, ?63 was for food, or roughly ?21 per meal, leaving ?28 for everything else.
Everything else meaning housing, electricity, water, transportation, medicine, education, clothing and the hundred other things human beings inconveniently need besides three ?21 meals.
Try living on that before telling somebody he is no longer poor.
IBON’s objection is not really to the PSA’s data gathering but to the poverty threshold itself. It argues that the food component is based on a least-cost basket, while non-food requirements are not separately priced but derived using a multiplier.
That’s the problem with celebrating 9.7 percent without explaining what it measures. Cross the official threshold and you are no longer counted as poor even if you have no savings, live paycheck to paycheck and have to borrow money the moment somebody in the family gets sick.
It reminds me of the unemployment figures government regularly celebrates. The unemployment rate can go down without everybody who needs work actually finding a job because it is calculated against the labor force as officially defined. Someone who has given up looking for work can fall outside the labor force altogether.
The tambay who hasn’t seriously looked for a job in months isn’t necessarily unemployed in the statistical sense. He may simply no longer be counted.
The same caution should apply to poverty.
What caught my attention was not even the 9.7-percent poverty incidence. According to the PSA, mean per-capita family income increased by 22 percent between 2023 and 2025, while the poverty threshold increased by only 5.5 percent. More remarkably, income among the poorest tenth of families supposedly increased by 23.8 percent and that of the next poorest tenth by 22.7 percent.
That’s quite a feat. The poorest Filipinos increased their incomes by almost a fourth in two years. I would really like to know how they did it, because the rest of the economy apparently didn’t get the memo.
Did wages rise by anything close to that? Did millions suddenly find better-paying jobs? Did farmers and fishermen become more prosperous? Did contractual workers become regular employees?
Or did part of the increase come from something Filipinos have become intimately familiar with?
There is 4Ps. There is AICS. There is TUPAD. There was AKAP. Now there is UPLIFT. Every few years another acronym appears and another program distributes cash, food, temporary employment or some other assistance to millions of Filipinos.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Social protection is one of government’s responsibilities. A family that hasn’t eaten needs food now, not an economics lecture. Someone who loses his livelihood after a typhoon needs immediate help.
But assistance is supposed to keep people from falling through the floor. It shouldn’t become the floor.
Ayuda can keep somebody from going hungry. TUPAD can put money in somebody’s pocket for a few days. Both have their uses. But neither should be confused with creating a decent permanent job, raising productivity or building a middle class.
A country cannot cash-transfer its way into prosperity.
The old saying was that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime. In the Ayuda Nation, we give him the fish, photograph the turnover, put somebody’s name on a tarpaulin and tell him when to come back for the next distribution.
TUPAD is a perfect example. Temporary emergency employment has its uses, but paying somebody to sweep a street or clean a canal for several days is not the same as creating a permanent productive job.
We recently reached the absurd point where Malacañang complained that some TUPAD beneficiaries were allegedly staging cleanup work for photographs, even supposedly piling garbage together so they could pose while sweeping it before leaving the garbage behind.
You couldn’t invent a better metaphor for the Ayuda Nation.
There is another reason ayuda matters to this discussion. The Family Income and Expenditure Survey doesn’t measure wages alone. Household resources can come from various sources, including remittances, pensions, gifts and transfers.
Nothing improper about that. If government gives a struggling family additional money, the family really does have additional money. But if that money pushes the household above the poverty threshold, have we permanently lifted that family out of poverty or merely pushed it across the statistical line?
What happens when the ayuda stops?
Government looks at them and says: Kaya n’yo na ‘yan.
IBON’s own estimates from the 2023 FIES help put this in perspective. It estimated that the poorest half of Filipino families had monthly incomes of about ?23,000 or less, while roughly 70 percent had incomes of ?29,000 or less.
So there is an enormous population between officially poor and financially secure.
One hospitalization can wipe them out. One lost job can put them in debt. An electricity rate increase hurts. An oil price spike hurts. A week without income hurts.
This is also why I chuckle whenever somebody announces that the Philippines is now an upper-middle-income country. A country can cross a World Bank income threshold without its people suddenly becoming upper middle class, just as a Filipino can cross the PSA poverty threshold without suddenly becoming financially secure.
The classifications can be perfectly correct while life remains considerably less impressive.
And this supposed poverty miracle comes at an interesting time. The economy grew by only 2.3 percent in the second quarter, the weakest quarterly performance outside the pandemic in 17 years. Investment has weakened and industry contracted.
Yet we have just achieved one of the most dramatic reductions in poverty in Philippine history.
Maybe we did. I hope we did.
But I’d like to know what kind of poverty those 6.5 million Filipinos escaped from and, more importantly, what they escaped into.
That is what the 9.7-percent headline doesn’t tell us.
There is a world of difference between not being officially poor and having enough money to live a decent life.
So, again, congratulations to the 6.5 million Filipinos reportedly lifted out of poverty.
Check your wallets.