46% of Pinoys believe economy will improve in next 12 months │ GMA News Online
Forty-six percent of Filipino adults believe that the economy will improve in the next 12 months, a recent Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey showed.
The SWS’ First Quarter 2022 Social Weather Survey, conducted from April 19 to 27 and released Sunday, also showed that 28% of Filipinos said the economy will stay the same while 6% said it will worsen over the same period.
SWS said the survey yielded an “excellent” Net Economic Optimism score of +40.
The Net Economic Optimism was highest in Balance Luzon (+46), followed by Metro Manila (+43), Mindanao (+43), and Visayas (+18).
“The latest Net Economic Optimism score is 4 points below the excellent +44 in December 2021. It used to be mediocre -9 in July 2020, mediocre -5 in September 2020, and high +24 in November 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic,” SWS said.
Meanwhile, the April 2022 survey also found that 44% of Filipinos are optimistic that their quality of life will improve in the next 12 months, 39% said it will stay the same, 4% said it will worsen, while the remaining 13% did not give an answer.
The same survey also revealed that 34% of Filipinos said their quality of life was worse than twelve months before, 32% said it got better, and 34% saying it was the same.
It also showed that 43% of Filipino families rated themselves as poor, 34% rated themselves as borderline poor, while 23% rated themselves as not poor.
On July 1, the Bureau of the Treasury reported that the national government’s total outstanding debt stood at P12.495 trillion, down 2.1% or P267.415 billion lower than the P12.763 trillion debt pile as of end-April.
Meanwhile, Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno earlier said the administration is looking to end President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s term with a single-digit poverty rate of 9% and a healthy debt-to-GDP ratio of 60%.
As of the first half of 2021, poverty rate was at 23.7%, higher than the 21.1% recorded in the same period in 2018.
As of the first quarter of 2022, the government debt-to-GDP ratio — the amount of the state’s debt relative to the size of the economy — stood at 63.5%, its highest in 17 years and well over the internationally recommended threshold of 60% of the economy.
The latest SWS survey used face-to-face interviews with 1,440 adults nationwide. Of these respondents, 360 were each from the Balance Luzon, Metro Manila, Visayas, and Mindanao.
It also had sampling error margins of ±2.6% for national percentages and ±5.2% for Balance Luzon, Metro Manila, Visayas, and Mindanao.—AOL, GMA News
