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Mahar Mangahas and Linda Luz B. Guerrero
In the Philippines, the non-stock, non-profit institute Social Weather Stations (www.sws.org.ph) has conducted and publicly reported many statistically-representative national surveys of social, economic and political well-being. Each survey includes economic deprivation, as measured by self-rated poverty (quarterly since 1992) and involuntary hunger (quarterly since 1998), since eradicating poverty and hunger are universally recognized as national goals. Since 1985, families that self-rate as poor have ranged between 74 percent and 43 percent. The self-rating scale includes “not poor”, “border-line” and “poor”. Since 1998, those that experienced involuntary hunger (at least once in the past three months) have ranged between 23.7 percent and 5.1 percent. Involuntary hunger may be either “moderate” (occurring only once or a few times) or “severe” (occurring often or always).
The SWS surveys also have data on suffering, derivable from items on (a) happiness with life, in 20 rounds over 1991-2011, and (b) life-satisfaction, in 16 rounds over 2002-2011, both items using four-point answer scales. These are irregular items, since not specifically targetted by government. In the data-series, those not very or not at all happy have ranged between 8 and 24 percent, and those not very or not at all satisfied with life have ranged between 16 percent and 40 percent. Cross-sectional examination of recent surveys indicates a close relation of the incidence of suffering to hunger, and a lesser yet significant relation of the same to self-rated poverty, thus implying social accountability for some part of suffering. For this paper, the authors will examine the Philippine time-series on suffering and economic deprivation, and report the findings.