No Corruption = No Poverty?

Exactly 70 days ago, President Benigno Simeon ‘Noynoy’ C. Aquino III became the Philippines’ 15th president, triggering a contagion of hopefulness among Filipinos with his battle cry, “Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap.”

But while his first two months in office marked vigorous efforts to address the first part – filing suit against alleged tax evaders nearly weekly, creating a “Truth Commission” to hound crooks of the old regime, and firing midnight appointees of his predecessor Gloria Macapagal Arroyo – he has announced only tentative and inchoate initiatives to address the second part.

Aquino’s campaign slogan might also be too simplistic, however. It gives the wrong impression that by curbing corruption, poverty will, on its own, work its way out of the system.

Attached is the third and last part of our report on the poverty challenge that confronts Aquino. It looks at how the administration proposes to deliver on the President’s equation of “no corruption = no poverty.”

It comes with a sidebar on the National Anti-Poverty Commission or NAPC that to this day remains without a new lead convenor. Aquino has yet to appoint one and rescue from limbo NAPC’s 100-odd personnel. The “coordinating and advisory” agency for the poor, NAPC was created by the Social Reform and Poverty Alleviation Act of 1998.

Meanwhile, the President’s economic team has launched an “inclusive growth framework” for tackling poverty. Government economists have also started to spell out what the Aquino administration has to do for the Philippines to meet its commitment to reduce poverty incidence by half, within the deadline of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.

That would be a poverty incidence of 23 percent by 2015, from the base figure of 45.3 percent in 2001. Right now the figure stands at 33 percent.

If he so intends to fulfill the MDGs, the big burden on Aquino is this: In absolute numbers, rescue from poverty at least 278,852 Filipino families every year, in the next five years. These are the families who survive on less than one dollar or P45 a day – the poverty threshold income that the United Nations says should be increased by now to $1.50 at least.