The United Nations (UN) Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) is conducting its session on the 7th periodic report of the Philippine government on its compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Participating as an observer and submitting an independent assessment, IBON Foundation urges the Committee and the government to confront the reality of worsening poverty, inequality, and precarious living conditions faced by millions of Filipinos.
The hype about the country’s economic growth intentionally masks the deteriorating conditions of the majority. The Philippine government’s report paints a misleading picture. The CESCR must look beyond official claims and prosperity for a few and see the lived experience of millions of poor and low-income Filipino families.
The government’s short-term and superficial fixes may give the impression of action, but these are far too small in scale for the magnitude of the problems at hand. This includes pointing to laws and policies that exist on paper but are not meaningfully implemented and have only limited positive outcomes. The country needs transformative reforms that address poverty, inequality, and workers’ rights – not token measures for show.
Widening gap between growth and reality
The Philippine government reports robust economic growth and declining official poverty rates, but IBON’s independent assessment highlights the opposite reality on the ground:
- Severe poverty and hunger persist: Official poverty statistics reporting only 17.9% of families are poor use an unreasonably low threshold of Php91 per person per day (approximately US$1.64), which downplays the extent of hardship. In contrast, self-rated poverty surveys by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) show that the number of families considering themselves poor increased from an annual average of 50.5% of families in 2015, before the last CESCR report on the Philippines, to 56.5% or 15.6 million families in 2024. Hunger affected 26% of families, or some 7.2 million families, by the end of 2024. This is consistent with Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) data reporting the number of households without savings in any form increasing to 20.1 million households, or 74% of the total, in the fourth quarter of 2024.
- Inequality deepening: Economic growth has clearly disproportionately benefited the richest few. Amid growing poverty and hunger, the combined net worth of the Philippines’ top three billionaires surged from Php91.5 billion in 2015 to Php1.5 trillion in 2024. The number of high net worth individuals with US$1 million or more doubled from 35,037 in 2015 to 69,804 in 2022, according to Credit Suisse.
- Workers stuck in low wages and insecure jobs: Real wages have declined across 16 out of 17 regions since the regionalization of wage-setting in 1989, while worker productivity increased by 88 percent. Informal and insecure work remains pervasive, accounting for over 77% of total employment. Contractualization and short-term labor arrangements continue to deprive workers of job security and fair wages. Government labor market programs are unable to address systemic unemployment and underemployment.
- Public services displaced by debt and infrastructure spending: Government spending increasingly prioritizes debt servicing and infrastructure over social services. The share of the budget for health, education, and social protection has declined. Filipinos pay 44.4% of total health expenses out-of-pocket which is among the highest in Southeast Asia, a situation that will be made worse by the Marcos Jr administration’s diversion of PhilHealth funds and drastic PhilHealth budget cuts.
- Landlessness and housing insecurity: Land reform progress is lagging, with tenanted farm areas increasing instead of decreasing. Over a third (35.9%) of urban residents or some 19.4 million people still live in slum conditions.
IBON’s proposals for genuine progress
There is overwhelming evidence that trickle-down economics has failed. Plotting the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita growth against poverty data shows that rapid economic growth since the 2000s has not really translated into reduced poverty. The Philippines is a textbook case of exclusionary growth. Wealth is concentrated at the top, while poverty and precarious living conditions persist or even worsen for the majority.
Addressing systemic poverty and inequality requires structural reforms centered on economic, social, and cultural rights:
- National industrialization and jobs-centered economy: Prioritize national industrialization and technological progress as the main thrusts of economic policy to create stable, decent jobs. Reorient trade and investment, financial and monetary, and fiscal policies away from neoliberal approaches that have not yielded broad-based and sustainable development and only worsened structural inequalities.
- Genuine agrarian reform: Fast-track land distribution and support farmers with resources to ensure rural livelihoods, food security and a base for industrial progress.
- Expand public services: Reverse the decline in spending on health, education, housing, and social protection. Reverse the privatization of essential services and instead strengthen public provision towards universal access.
- Social protection as a right: Recognize emergency and cash assistance programs as legitimate rights, not political favors, with decisive action against patronage-driven distribution of aid.
- Family living wage: Implement a national minimum wage and gradually increase this to the family living wage, to ensure that wages keep pace with the cost of living, reflect worker productivity, and improve the well-being of workers and their families.
- End contractualization: Enact long-delayed legislation to guarantee secure employment and workers’ rights to tenure.
- Progressive taxation and billionaire wealth tax: Increase income taxes on high-income families and large corporations, and introduce a billionaire wealth tax to fund public services and reduce inequality.
- Realistic poverty and employment data: Revise poverty thresholds to reflect actual living costs, and improve labor force surveys to measure real earnings from reported employment and count discouraged job-seekers as among the unemployed.
- Human rights-based budgeting: Assess the national budget from a human rights perspective to ensure that public funds address the needs of the poor and vulnerable.
- Codify economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) into law: Pass legislation that explicitly defines and upholds the rights to food, water, health, education, work, and housing.
- Expand the Commission on Human Rights (CHR): Increase the CHR’s budget and mandate to monitor and report on ESCR compliance, and provide remedies for rights violations.
- Ensure transparency, real public participation and civic space: Guarantee access to information, enable meaningful anti-corruption measures, and stop attacks on civil society and instead empower this to participate more fully in local and national governance.
Call for CESCR and government action
IBON urges the UN CESCR to issue strong concluding observations that better reflect the realities faced by poor Filipinos and calls on the Philippine government to respond with concrete policy shifts. The government’s performative accountability gives the appearance of diligence and it data dumps to conceal the lack of meaningful, long-term improvements. Yet its quantitative and reporting camouflage cannot erase the worsening situation of workers, farmers, informals and other poor.
The economy should stop just making a few oligarchs and foreign capital prosperous. Realizing economic, social, and cultural rights requires more than growth and demands national industrialization, land reform and rural development, just wages and secure jobs, and universal social services.