We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. To find out more, please click this link.
In 2023Q1, the national percentage of Self-Rated Poor households was 51, unchanged from 2022Q4. Last year, it had been 43 in Q1, 48 in Q2, and 49 in Q3. The halt in the rise of general poverty…
The new Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey report—“47% agree it is dangerous to publish things critical of the administration; 27% are undecided, 26% disagree” (www.sws.org.ph, 5/9/23)—is meant, not for Mother’s Day tomorrow, but for World Press Freedom…
Eid Mubarak to Filipino Muslims everywhere, and to Muslims in the Philippines. Having done an Easter piece six days after Holy Week, I will do an Eid’l Fitr piece today, my first opportunity after Ramadan, which ended…
Holy Saturday being Social Climate’s annual day off, my Holy Week column is always the Saturday after. Last year’s “The religiosity of Filipinos” (4/23/22) looked into “hard” versus “soft” belief in God, and into beliefs in the…
Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matters. Most of the world’s poor people earn their living…
The annual International Day of Happiness (March 20) saw the release of World Happiness Report (WHR) 2023 recently. In this 10th WHR since the Day was established by the United Nations in 2012, Finland, scoring 7.80 on…
Subjectivity in survey data cannot be avoided. The simple act of asking a sample of people certain questions, and recording their subjective answers, entails faith that the data will be useful to you. Surveys of voters’ intentions…
The phrase, “A damaged culture,” which first appeared in 1987 in The Atlantic magazine, is readily trotted out by lazy writers when things go wrong. But characterizing the Filipino people by it is wrong. It merely sounds…
Think of the government’s economic managers as pilots guided by instruments that periodically flash important figures on a panel in front of S. Some figures appear daily, like the stock price index and the foreign exchange rate.…
In my opinion, our people, anywhere in the world, are very religious, not due to being mostly Catholic, or even due to being mostly Christian, but simply due to being Filipino. A few days ago—timed for Ash…
The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) is the government’s first true venture into solving the great poverty problem by identifying and targeting poor people to receive benefits directly, rather than by assuming that much benefit from untargeted…
The gross national product (GNP) of the Philippines is the money value of all goods and services produced in a given time period by Filipino entities. As a measure of aggregate economic activity, it works; more GNP…
We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. To find out more, please click this link.