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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…
As 2022 closed, after three pandemic years, the people getting better off have finally outnumbered those getting worse off. In the SWS December 2022 survey, there were 34 percent of Filipino adults saying their quality of life…
In 2022, 12 percent of Filipino families experienced hunger at least once in the previous three months (“Fourth Quarter 2022 Social Weather Survey: Hunger moves from 11.3% to 11.8%,” www.sws.org.ph, 10/19/2023). The December 2022 round was SWS’…
The start of a new year seems a good time to clarify the vision and mission of Social Weather Stations. My perspective is simply that of the oldest of the SWS veterans, where my title has been…
This year marks 40 years since the pioneer national survey of Self-Rated Poverty (SRP) in the Philippines, done in April 1983, which discovered that 55 percent of household heads interviewed rated their families as Mahirap, rather than…
As the calendar year closes, oldies like me simply feel grateful for having survived the past 365 days, from which we must brace up for another 365. However, for Filipino adults as a whole, normally—but not always—at…
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