Lies, damn lies and statistics

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Mark Twain used the line in his autobiography to deliver the message that statistics are the most powerful and dangerous way to mislead people, because numbers look objective and scientific even when they are twisted to support a false claim.

The report last week from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) that our poverty incidence fell to its lowest rate last year, dropping from 15.5 percent in 2023 to 9.7 percent in 2025 seems to be a good example of Mark Twain’s view.

No, the PSA is not populated by a bunch of liars when they claimed an estimated 6.5 million Filipinos were lifted out of poverty between 2023 and 2025. That’s just what the numbers they have churned say based on outdated parameters. They are also overworked and underfunded.

If DEPDev Secretary Arsi Balisacan thinks reporting this supposedly “historic decline” is a good way of boosting the image of BBM, he is terribly wrong. It merely reinforced the view that our government lies or is out of touch with reality. Just check comments on social media.

Economist Sonny Africa of IBON Foundation was right to quickly point out why PSA’s assumptions are wrong. PSA’s P4,634 monthly poverty threshold for a family of five means a person with P96 per day already has enough for his basic needs.

“By this standard, only 6.4 percent of Filipino families were poor in 2025 compared with 51 percent who said they were poor in 2025 according to SWS’s self-rated poverty survey.”

I asked the opinion of Dr. Jose Ramon “Toots” Albert, who formerly served as the chief statistician of the Philippines, which functionally included heading the country’s statistical systems before they were merged.

Dr. Toots said Sonny is right that P96 per person a day is a low bar for a country reclassified as upper middle-income. He said he had been saying the same for years. He explained that the methodology used by PSA today dates back to 2011 and was due for review in 2021 but the review never happened.

“Our national line sits at roughly the level of the World Bank’s $4.20 a day threshold, the one the Bank uses to monitor lower middle-income countries. We have outgrown the yardstick.”

Dr. Toots goes on to explain that the self-rated poverty survey of SWS measures a relative and subjective judgment that moves with what people see around them, and how prices have behaved lately.

“If you ask which official measure comes closest to what SWS respondents are reporting, it isn’t the national line… It’s the World Bank $8.30 line, the one associated with upper middle-income economies. That puts roughly 59 percent of Filipinos below it on income and 74 percent on consumption. That’s the neighborhood of the SWS number…

“One more figure worth having… Our line is packed extremely tightly. Raising it by the seven percent implied by the average of what Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam use — about P960 a month for a family of five, P6.30 per person per day — moves close to four million Filipinos from above the line to below it. And that crowding just above the threshold has intensified over the past decade rather than eased…

“Whatever one concludes about the policy framework, that isn’t a picture of durable security, and it’s why I wouldn’t read 6.4 percent as grounds for satisfaction… What I’d say is that the numbers don’t support complacency.

“Between 2015 and 2023 real household income per capita rose about seven percent in eight years while GDP per capita rose 24 percent — households captured well under a third of the growth in output per head.”

In so many words, most of the poverty reduction over that stretch highlights a structural weakness. Poverty dropped on paper, but it was not driven by the ideal engine: a surge in high-quality, high-paying jobs or robust economic productivity that makes everyone richer.

Dr. Toots said “the recalibration is the argument worth pressing, and I understand PSA intends to release it before the end of the year…”

Economist Alex Escucha raises another important consideration that tarnishes the eagerness of government technocrats to take premature victory laps.

“The national average conceals a country running at two speeds. NCR sits at 1.1 percent poverty; Zamboanga Peninsula and BARMM sit above 23 percent. Ten of the country’s regions actually recorded higher poverty in 2021 than in 2018 — meaning the national “decline” story was never universal even in the best years… Structural poverty hasn’t dissolved; it’s been diluted by faster gains in already-rich NCR and Calabarzon.”

“Here is where the ‘historic decline’ claim gets genuinely shaky. The 2023 poverty threshold — the last one officially computed — pegs subsistence at P13,873 a month for a family of five, with the food component working out to roughly P21 per person, per meal. Even PSA’s own National Statistician has publicly conceded the food threshold is ‘insufficient.”

Sec. Arsi made a big error in judgment by releasing this so-called historic poverty rate drop. They should have first updated the assumptions.

As Dr. Toots points out, “a poverty line prices a bundle of what people need to live decently. That bundle moves. And it has moved a lot since 2011.

“In 2013, half of households in the poorest fifth had a mobile phone; by 2022 three quarters did, and nationally, it’s 92 percent. Electricity in the poorest quintile went from 45 to 75 percent over the same period. Radio ownership in the poorest quintile fell from 57 to 47 percent because the phone replaced it.

“A bundle fixed in 2011 still counts the radio and doesn’t count mobile data which is now how a household applies for 4Ps, gets a PhilSys appointment, sends a child to school during class suspensions or looks for work.”

What good will outdated statistics do? It only reduces whatever little credibility our government has.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him X @boochanco