CARTOON BY: AARON PAUL C. CARIL
EDITORIAL
Upper middle income, empty plates
Before sunrise in a coastal town like Mabini, Bohol, the sea is still black, the air smells of salt and kerosene, and a small cooking fire burns beneath a dented pot. A fishing household may spread damp bills and warm coins on the table, listening to the first tricycles rattle past while deciding what survives the day: a kilo of rice, fare for one child, medicine stretched for another day, or a power bill folded back into a drawer. When income rises and falls with weather, fuel, and the day’s catch, poverty is not a number on a government chart. It is the scrape of an almost-empty pot and the silence after a parent chooses which need must wait.
This is the uneasy human backdrop to the World Bank’s reclassification of the Philippines as an upper middle income country. The label rests on 2025 gross national income per capita of about US$4,850, just above the US$4,636 threshold, after years of average growth near 5.8 percent. It is a milestone—but for many families, it feels like praise for a house whose front wall has been painted while the kitchen remains empty.
These figures should be read as national averages, not household guarantees: gross national income per capita divides the economy’s total income across the population, but it does not show how that income is distributed, who receives it, or whether it reaches families living from one day’s work to the next.
Official poverty figures explain why applause should catch in the throat. The Philippine Statistics Authority placed poverty incidence at 15.5 percent in 2023, or about 17.54 million Filipinos unable to meet basic needs. Surveys on self-rated poverty capture a wider public perception of hardship, though they are not directly comparable with official poverty incidence. Behind those figures are parents watering down soup, workers delaying checkups, and children learning early that tomorrow depends on what can be sacrificed today.
So what does upper middle income mean to such families? Not cheaper fish, steadier jobs, paid debts, or a mother finally sleeping without calculating tomorrow’s meals. It may mean less access over time to some concessional financing, higher expectations from lenders and investors, and a government eager to sell the upgrade as proof of progress. But for households facing low wages, informal work, weak transport, poor health services, and expensive food, UMIC can sound like a party invitation delivered to a family that cannot afford the fare.
The likely immediate winners are officials with a ribbon-cutting statistic, investors reading stability, creditors seeing lower risk, and businesses positioned to catch better capital flows. That is not automatically bad. But if growth keeps flowing upward while hunger stays at the table, the celebration becomes cruel. A country cannot call itself richer while asking its poorest families to prove progress on empty stomachs.
The question, then, is not whether the Philippines is upper middle income, but whether it can become less unequal and less indifferent. An OECD paper cited a Gini coefficient of 40.7 percent in 2021, with the bottom half receiving about 14 percent of national income while the top 1 percent captured about 17 percent. The World Bank put the 2023 Gini index at 39.34—better, but hardly a victory lap. Until weak competition, land and regional inequality, low farm productivity, precarious work, poor services, and dependence on remittances are addressed, UMIC will remain a beautiful label pasted over a broken promise. A country does not become truly richer when its statistics rise; it becomes richer when its poorest families no longer have to choose between rice, medicine, and light.