THE PHILIPPINES needs to look beyond minimum subsistence standards and consider whether Filipinos can afford healthy diets when assessing poverty, particularly following its transition to upper-middle income country (UMIC) status, a government economist said.
Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) Senior Research Fellow Roehlano M. Briones said the Philippines should adopt more ambitious standards for measuring poverty in line with its higher income classification.
“We need to level up our measurement standard,” Mr. Briones said during a PIDS webinar on Tuesday. “Graduate na tayo sa subsistence line, tignan na natin ’yung cost of a healthy diet (We have graduated from subsistence level and need to target making diets healthy). We should elevate our ambition as supposedly an UMIC.”
He was discussing the implications of declining poverty on food security.
The Philippine Statistics Authority reported the poverty rate of 9.7% in 2025, against 15.5% in 2023.
However, Mr. Briones noted that the national poverty threshold stood at around P98 per person per day, equivalent to P14,634 per month for a family of five.
“In other words, there’s an element of arbitrariness in these lines. The objective of this line is not to check our own perception of our experience, but to check some performance indicators over time,” he said.
The World Bank placed the Philippines in the UMIC category after its gross national income (GNI) per capita hit a record $4,850, exceeding the minimum threshold for the UMIC category of $4,636.
UMIC economies have a GNI per capita of between $4,636 and $14,375.
The World Bank’s Macro Poverty Outlook projects that 55.2% of Filipinos will fall below the upper-middle income poverty line of $8.30 per day in 2026, based on 2021 purchasing power parity (PPP).
This compares with an estimated poverty rate of 13.4% using the lower-middle income poverty line of $4.20 per day under the same PPP measure.
Mr. Briones said the country has yet to adopt a higher poverty threshold despite its recent graduation to UMIC status.
Novel V. Bangsal, executive director of the Budget and Tax Research Bureau of the Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department, said he does not expect the recent UMIC elevation to significantly change the situation when it comes to poverty.
“There’s so much work to be done,” he said at the same forum, noting that weak economic growth over the past three quarters could pose a risk to UMIC status.
“We have to make sure that we’re able to sustain this economic momentum towards a much higher economic growth trajectory,” he added.
Mr. Briones also noted that since the Philippines only recently attained UMIC status, it still has more in common with lower-middle income countries than with economies that have held UMIC status for years. — Justine Irish D. Tabile