A record we should read carefully

The Philippine Statistics Authority’s latest numbers initially look like the best poverty statistics the country has produced in decades.

Poverty incidence among individuals fell to 9.7 percent in 2025, down from 18.1 percent in 2021; among families, it dropped to 6.4 percent, the first time this figure has fallen into single digits.

Officials at the Department of Economy, Planning, and Development have framed this as vindication as 8.8 million Filipinos, they say, were lifted out of poverty in four years.

Some of that story is real.

Income among the poorest tenth of the population grew faster than the national average between 2023 and 2025—23.8 percent, against a 22 percent mean—suggesting workers genuinely moved from low-productivity agriculture into better-paying construction and services jobs.

Cash transfers added a steadier layer beneath that. None of this should be dismissed.

But a second story is embedded in these numbers. This refers to the instrument doing the measuring, not the households being measured.

The threshold behind these figures—P14,634 a month for a family of five in 2025—rests on a food bundle whose adequacy PSA’s own leadership has publicly questioned.

At a press briefing on August 15, 2024, National Statistician Claire Dennis Mapa acknowledged, amid sustained criticism, that the prevailing food threshold—then about P64 a day, or P21 per meal—was “really insufficient,” though he defended it as reflecting minimum basic needs at least cost.

Methodology

PSA committed to revising the methodology, a review that, by Mapa’s own account, had been due since 2021.

Two years on from that admission, and four years past the original deadline, it still has not been implemented.

That commitment has since acquired specifics.

Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee in late August 2025, as reported by business newspapers, Economy Undersecretary Rosemarie Edillon said the revised threshold would account for age, sex, and household size, drawing on new 2024 census data.

The current threshold is fundamentally based on food subsistence, but poverty is simply beyond food expenditures. This explains the need to consider the other factors in the equation.

But this recalibration still awaits PSA Board approval, and until then, the 2023 methodology stays in force.

Under the current methodology, the monthly threshold for a family of five rose from P13,873 in 2023 to P14,634 in 2025, just 5.5 percent over two years, barely ahead of ordinary price movement and nowhere near what correcting an inadequate food basket would produce.

Had Edillon’s revised methodology already taken effect, we would expect a larger jump.

A family newly counted as “nonpoor” in the current setup can be living close to genuine food subsistence but may not be able to meet other basic necessities.

The milestone is thus real relative to the ruler. However, it is less clear if it is real relative to what the ruler is meant to measure.

There is a defense of this delayed adjustment worth taking seriously. The argument is that if the threshold changed every cycle, no one could tell whether poverty moved because conditions changed or the ruler did.

On this reading, officials are treating the threshold the way a scientist treats a control group. Though imperfect, the control allows year-on-year comparisons to evaluate logically the effect of government programs.

Changing it midcycle would be moving the goalposts midcontest, making this a fair and logical government line of defense.

But consistency and accuracy are not the same virtue.

A standard fix for this tension would involve revising the instrument, then rebasing the historical series under the new definition, rather than leaving it in place indefinitely.

PSA used this approach when it periodically updates GDP base years, allowing the record to remain comparable and accurate at once as every prior year gets restated on the corrected basket.

The 2023 methodology now in use is itself the product of an earlier revision.

“Never change the ruler” has never really been the operating principle. Mapa’s own team showed this is feasible when it ran a sensitivity simulation raising the threshold 10 percent against 2023 data.

Clearly, what is missing is not method, but political will.

Revison

Timing also compounds the problem. The 2025 survey window largely predates the sharpest phase of this year’s economic deterioration. Since then, inflation has climbed back above 6 percent on Middle East-driven oil and food shocks, and GDP growth slowed to 2.3 percent in the second quarter, the weakest reading in years. None of which shows up in the 9.7 percent figure.

We are celebrating a snapshot of an economy that no longer exists, measured with a calibration that is itself under review.

The government need not abandon the genuine progress here to acknowledge the threshold is overdue for revision.

The revision, whenever it lands, could push the official rate back up for reasons that have nothing to do with households getting poorer.

Hence, this would not be seen as a step backward, but an honest attempt to measure poverty accurately.

The least that DEPDev and PSA can do now is to publish a simulation of the 2025 rate under the proposed threshold, as PSA did for 2023.

Absent that, the milestone risks becoming a number the government has every incentive to protect by delaying a correction it already promised—not through deceit, but because no administration wants its own reform to erase its signature achievement.

Filipinos deserve a poverty statistic that survives contact with an honest yardstick. Right now, we don’t know if this one does. —contributed INQ