If you recall his first State of the Nation Address in July 2022, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. made a bold promise: by 2028, the end of his term, poverty would fall to a single digit, 9% to be exact.
It was hard to believe then. Poverty stood at 18.1% in 2021. Cutting that in half in six years would have required the fastest sustained poverty reduction in our history, at a time when the economy was still crawling out of the pandemic.
Now a new World Bank report all but confirms the target is unfeasible. In its latest poverty assessment for the Philippines, titled “Building the Filipino Middle Class,” the World Bank projects that even if the economy converts growth into poverty reduction as efficiently as it did before COVID-19 (already a generous assumption) poverty will fall only to 12.3% by 2028. The Bank’s own simulations show that under current policies, poverty will still be at 11.1% by 2030.
In other words, the single-digit dream is dead. The President will leave office with the promise unmet.
But the report’s deeper message is more sobering than a missed target.
