Most Asian countries, including the Philippines, are keeping to the United Nations' 15-year plan for halving extreme poverty in the continent by 2015.
The plan was launched seven-and-a-half years ago, at the turn of the new millennium. The goal also includes improving health and education for the most deprived members of society and increasing the empowerment of women.
Twenty UN agencies released a halfway-mark report on Monday showing progress to date in meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
"The greatest gains were in East Asia, where the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day fell from 33 percent in 1990 to 9.9 percent in 2004," an Agence France-Presse report said.
"In Southeast Asia, the ratio dropped from 20.8 percent to 6.8 over the same period, said Shigeru Mochida, deputy executive secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. This is the subregion to which we in the Philippines belong.
"But Asia's unprecedented poverty reduction was accompanied by evidence that the benefits of economic growth are not being shared across the continent," Mochida added. "In Southern Asia, for example, almost 30 percent of the population was still living on a dollar a day."
A very sad thing is that this "positive trend in poverty reduction has been accompanied by rapidly rising inequality within countries. Eastern Asia has experienced the most dramatic rise in income inequality," Mochida said.
And progress in improving child nutrition is, in Mochida's words, "unacceptably low."
Philippine government statistics, indeed, show that poverty has been declining year by year since President Arroyo took office.
The average self-rated poverty during different administrations has been on the decline since the time of the late Ferdinand Marcos (64.5 percent), through the term of presidents Corazon Aquino (63.4), Fidel Ramos (62.2), Joseph Estrada (59.6) and now President Arroyo (56.32).
No doubt various government offices are at work to help alleviate poverty. The national budget for 2007 allocates P1.126 trillion for various anti-poverty programs. Malacaņang has called this gigantic fund allocation the government's "social payback to the people."
SWS poverty survey
The Social Weather Stations (SWS) self-rated poverty survey for the first quarter of the year, however, conducted from February 24 to 27, yielded distressing results. It showed that 53 percent of Filipino families rated themselves as poor, with figures rising in all areas but falling in Metro Manila by 15 points from 54 percent in the November 2006 survey (last quarter of 2006).
Self-rated poverty, according to the SWS survey rose last February in Luzon from 48 percent to 53 percent. In the Visayas, it also went up from 55 percent to 59 percent and in Mindanao from 54 percent to 57 percent.
The net result, the SWS said, was that self-rated poverty stayed virtually unchanged at the national level at 52 percent last November and 53 percent last February. A new SWS poverty survey will be released covering the second quarter soon.
We hope the statistics guiding the administration are correct.
Some respected economists, including former National Economic Development Authority chiefs, have expressed warnings about government statistics that may not be completely reliable.
They are not fighting the Arroyo administration's programs to take the Philippine economy to heights of achievement way beyond the 6.9 annual Gross Domestic Product rate of growth. They even wish the government to achieve double digit rates so that our country will really have drastically much fewer poor and hungry citizens.
They are not claiming either that the Arroyo administration's statisticians have been economical with the truth.
They are simply saying that much more work must be done to achieve the growth targets. And that much more precise data should guide economic-growth planning.
One of the things they have noticed is that the statistics show something very unusual. It appears that the purchasing power of Filipinos has lagged behind their personal consumption of goods and services.
Are some sectors being left out in the counting? Are the SWS self-rated poverty survey numbers more correct than the government's poverty-decline data?
It will help everybody-the President's economic team included-for these inconsistencies to be explained and their causes honestly corrected.
