Whose subjectivity is it?

The recent announcement by the World Bank (WB) that the Philippines had just passed from “lower-middle income” to “upper-middle income” status was its own call, or subjective judgement, of where we stand among its four internal categories of “low,” “lower middle,” “upper middle,” and “high” income countries. Obviously, the WB has different policies for each category, i.e., the higher the category, the less concessional its financial treatment.

With so few groups, moving from Group 2 to Group 3 is quite significant. Other international development institutions, like the Asian Development Bank, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which have relations to the Philippines, would take note of the WB’s classification. The subjective standards of these institutions and of the WB are not likely to differ widely.

Subjectivity of the people themselves. But how about Filipinos, in general—do they think they have gone from “lower middle” to “upper middle” with respect to income, or some other income-related standard? The subjective feelings of the people as a whole, from the bottom up, are measurable by scientific surveys done regularly over time.

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In the first place, one can compare the people’s perceived present status, however defined, in successive surveys. In particular, Self-Rated Poverty—a subjective indicator of Social Weather Stations (SWS)—has been stagnant at half of all families for the past two years. On the other hand, the Not Poor have grown to over one-third, at the expense of the Borderline. The subjectivity of the survey respondents is elicited from a show card with the words Mahirap and Hindi Mahirap, separated by a line, and asking them to point to where their family is on the card. (Interviewers do not read the card orally. Respondents should have reading ability; if blind, then family members may read the card for them.) SWS has used this methodology consistently in over 140 national surveys since the mid-1980s.

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The SWS surveys also report the Self-Rated Poverty Threshold (how much for home expenses—explained as excluding costs of commuting and other work-related expenses—do the Poor say they need in order not to feel that way). These thresholds in the SWS study areas are very reasonable; they express the subjectivity of the respondents, not that of SWS, in defining poverty.

In the second place, one can ask survey respondents directly for their perceived change in status from the past (say, a year ago) to the present. For some, their situation improved, for some it worsened, and for some it stayed the same. The net result, summarized by the net percentage of gainers over losers, has been negative for several quarters now, in the surveys of both SWS and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (see “BSP does surveys too,” 6/27/26).

The government’s subjectivity is embedded in its statistics about poverty. The official poverty line is periodically set by the Philippine Statistics Authority (psa.gov.ph), the successor of the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB), which initiated official poverty measurement with the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) of 1985 (if my memory serves). The FIES was a triennial survey then (it turned biennial in 2025, but its results are not yet ready).

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The NSCB relied on the Department of Science and Technology’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute (fnri.dost.gov.ph) to design a daily food menu capable of giving a standard-sized family the calories and nutrients needed for minimum subsistence, at the least cost. The NSCB then converted the minimum food cost to a minimum required income by simply assuming a fixed 69:31 ratio of food cost to nonfood cost, i.e., it did not study nonfood needs in detail.

The change in official subjectivity. This system continued until early 2011, when NSCB abruptly reduced the poverty line. In “The lowering of the official poverty line” (2/12/2011), I wrote: “This week, the official data on poverty changed. Last Tuesday Feb. 8, the NSCB announced that the 2009 incidence of poor families is 20.9 percent, based on a new (which it calls ‘refined’) methodology. It also announced that the old methodology would have put the incidence of poor families at 26.3 percent. Thus the NSCB ‘refinements’ resulted in re-classifying 26.3 – 20.9 = 5.4 percent of all families (or about 1 million families) out of official poverty in 2009. This came from lowering the average official 2009 poverty line for a family of five to P7,017 per month with the new system, from P7,953 per month with the old system.”

The NSCB did not explain how its new menu delivered the same nutritional value at a much lower cost; it certainly delivered less satisfaction from food. In the National Capital Region, it reduced official poverty to only 0.4 percent, from 2.6 percent under its former methodology (“Is poverty gone in NCR?”, 2/19/11).

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And what about employment? Is it reasonable that working for pay for one hour in the week prior to being interviewed for the Labor Force Survey is enough to be considered employed?

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