'Poverty alleviation most hobbled by pandemic'

All presidents in the post-Marcos Sr. era managed to reduce the country's poverty level, with the country surviving both the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 global meltdown, but not the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

- DELON PORCALLA

Statistics provided by the Department of Social Welfare and Development showed that poverty incidence shrank at an average of four percent every three years (where data is regularly gauged) from 1985 to 2023 - or from the administration of Marcos Sr. to his son Ferdinand Jr. The graph prepared by the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) showed there was massive poverty at 44.2 percent during 1985 under Marcos Sr., but which the late president Cory Aquino managed to drop to 40.2 three years later in 1988.

This went down further to 39.9 percent in 1991, a year before she stepped down from power in 1992.

Overall, she managed to bring down poverty level by a total of 4.3 percentage points from the era of political turmoil that toppled the Marcos Sr. presidency in February 1986.