What could your P50 get you? Fifteen years ago, you could get a Jollibee burger steak meal for just P39. Add P10 for a drink, and you had a complete meal for under P50. Today, the cost of the same burger steak approaches P100, depending on the branch. This is an instance of inflation, which is the general increase in prices over time.
How exactly do we measure inflation, and what does it mean for Filipinos?
Inflation is primarily measured using changes in the consumer price index (CPI), which tracks the weighted price of a market basket of goods and services typically consumed by Filipino households. Although the CPI is a standard economic indicator, its changes are not always intuitive and can be difficult to interpret for the common Filipino household.
To reflect how consumers experience inflation, it has been common to develop informal price indices, particularly in measuring the rising cost of food products. For instance, in 1986, The Economist introduced the Big Mac Index, a measure of purchasing power that tracks the price of the McDonald’s signature hamburger in different countries. For coffee lovers, the Starbucks Latte Index offers a similar measure and may be more intuitive. In the Philippines, we have our own version of an informal price index: the Adobo Index.
Introduced by Filipino food writer Ige Ramos, the Adobo Index tracks the purchasing power of the minimum wage in NCR by analyzing the price of a standard carinderia ulam or meal. Based on data from a sample of carinderias and government data for minimum wage, Ramos presents a measure of inflation that reflects Filipinos’ economic access to food. The index shows that between 2015 and 2025, the price of a carinderia meal rose from P35 to P75 (114 percent), while the minimum wage for non-agricultural workers increased from just P481 to P645 (34 percent). By comparison, data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) show that food inflation over the same period was 47 percent, far below the 114 percent rise in carinderia meal prices. Overall inflation was lower still, at 41 percent.
The Adobo Index reveals a harsher reality of inflation in the Philippines. In the past decade, meal prices have doubled while wages have lagged behind, magnifying the loss in purchasing power for minimum-wage earners. Poorer households are hit harder by rising food prices, reflecting a well-known empirical economic regularity given the name Engel’s Law (after the German economist Ernst Engel), which states that as household income rises, the proportion spent on food decreases even as total food expenditure increases. Alternatively stated, this means that food expenditure eats up a much greater share of the income of low-income households compared to higher-income households. The Engel Curve provides a graphical representation of this relationship and is often used in poverty measurement.
Consistent with Engel’s Law, microdata from the 2023 Family Income and Expenditure Survey show that households in the bottom income decile spend 53 percent of their income on food, compared to just 19 percent among those in the top decile. Furthermore, the bottom decile earns P12,000 a month on average, allocating slightly more than P6,000 a month for food-roughly P200 per day.
P200 can only buy about two and half carinderia meals, based on the Adobo Index, whereas the average family size for households in the poorest income decile is close to 6, which means P200 is not even enough for one full carinderia meal for all members. Given the current oil crisis driven by the conflict in Iran, the inflation outlook is worsening for families living on P200 a day for food. The surge in oil prices is already pushing up transportation and electricity costs, and with higher shipping and production costs, food prices are likely to follow. Efforts are underway to ease the impact, from local government fuel subsidies to coordination between national agencies and strategic partners. But given the uncertainty of the conflict, rising food prices continue to threaten food security for Filipinos.
The Philippine Statistics Authority recently reported that inflation rose from 2.4 percent in February 2026 to 4.1 percent in March 2026, exceeding the BSP projection of 3.1 to 3.9 percent. Food inflation for the bottom 30 percent income households was slightly higher, at 4.2 percent. Addressing inflation, then, is not only a matter of monetary policy, but of ensuring food remains accessible.
It is important that policymakers continue to implement and enhance programs that target subsidies to help affected families afford basic needs, ensure supply chains run efficiently to prevent unnecessary price spikes, and design wage policies that keep up with the rising cost of living.
We often talk about inflation in percentages, but for millions of Filipinos, it is measured in meals missed. Sometimes, the best economic indicator is the price of dinner.