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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…
MANILA, Philippines — More Filipino families saw themselves as food poor in the first quarter of this year, rising from 8.7 million in December 2022 to 10.6 million in March 2023, according to a Social Weather Stations…
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…
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…
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 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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