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Why is it that the majority of Filipinos live in absolute poverty in the Philippines?
admiralsubic
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Why is it that the majority of Filipinos live in absolute poverty in the Philippines?
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Absolute/extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1.90(PPP) per day, and according to the World Poverty Clock, just under 6 million Filipinos, or 5%, lived below that line in the middle of 2020, so the proportion in extreme poverty are a small and shrinking minority as a result of rapid economic growth in the past 2 decades. But in the ASEAN bloc, only Laos has a higher proportion of its people below the $1.90 line (13%), meaning that the removal of absolute poverty has been far slower in the Philippines, compared to even far poorer countries like Cambodia and Myanmar that have their proportions below 3%. Furthermore another 20% live below $3.20 daily and almost half below $5.50 per day. Much of the problem can be attributed to how repressive the economic system is with foreigners being shut out by the 60–40 rule in the constitution and how there is too much regulation and red tape that prevents businesses from opening or expanding their operations, thus preventing job opportunities from being made and tens of millions from having well-paying formal jobs. Worse, bad infrastructure outside of the major cities makes it a logistics nightmare for anyone desiring to invest in the Philippines. And with oligarchic families(who control most of the archipelago’s wealth and created this system in the first place) that desire to keep the population too poor to care about politics and thus overthrowing them from power, attempts at reform take a long time or don’t even happen at all. You can see the bickering between Duterte’s PDP-led coalition and the Liberal-led opposition over constitutional reform and business-enabling legislation all the time on the news. The long time it takes to pass a reform causes many poor Filipinos to adopt a fatalistic mindset, resigning that they won’t be able to lift themselves out of their poverty, and end up not trying at all or relying on family members working abroad. They also turn towards religion thinking that praying or having lots of children will get them out of their situation, when it just compounds the problem. Hence why there are still millions of Filipinos in relative poverty that will take longer to significantly reduce than it will to eradicate extreme poverty.
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That is the way an oligarchy works. The people in charge need to keep the majority of the population poor in order for it to remain in power. This is done in some pretty insidious ways too with age discrimination being the most benign. I know a great many women in their 30’s who have been fired from retail and food service jobs for just being too old to do the job anymore, by being too old they mean she no longer looks as good as the 18 year old they are replacing her with for half the pay. If any group of street vendors starts making too much money and showing obvious signs of wealth or financial freedom, the local oligarchs by the piece of land they were using, put up a few franchise places and then only hire people with a college degree giving preference to private college graduates whose high priced degree had to be paid for by a family with money. Want to see to it fewer people graduate high school bring in an administration team that will rigidly enforce rules that hurt the poorest students like having enough uniforms, the right shoes, harassing female students to the point they don’t want to be in school, insist students who can’t supply their classroom can’t attend class then cut classroom budgets. Even worse is for a district to be given no funds to fix earthquake damaged buildings. In my area alone there are four such grade schools that were closed as much as 5 years ago and have yet to reopen. All those children can in theory go to another school, but when you have all of a sudden doubled the fares to get to these schools and more than doubled the time it takes to get there from 45 minutes to 2 hours each way a lot of the kids just drop out or a family picks one kids to keep attending.