: BSP Gov. Eli Remolona Jr.
by Diego Morra
The most facile way to explain away poverty is that it is an existential problem, and the existentialist is responsible for everything that happens to him, and that is exactly what Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Gov. Eli Remolona Jr., tried to do when he dismissed individual penury as the result of consumerism, when false needs are created by malls, advertising agencies, influencers and the flu virus they disseminate, and some guys end up as compulsive buyers, like a senator we know.
Eli Jr., son of the eminent preacher and namesake Rev. Eli Remolona Sr., who also ministered to political prisoners during material law, took a different career path, he worked for 14 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and for 19 years at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and was regional head for Asia and the Pacific from 2008 to 2018. He edited the BIS Quarterly Review and was associate editor for finance of the International Journal of Central Banking. Appointed to head the BSP in 2023, the alumnus of Ateneo de Manila University acts as the whip of the financial and monetary system. Eli Jr. earns a whopping P53-million annually, but he sure husbands his finances, unlike the sakadas, parahagots and those who engage in pangangalakal who cannot earn the P695 minimum daily wage in Metro Manila.
Yet, as is usual with the pencil pushers of the Washington Consensus, they surely blame the poor for their poverty, their irrational spending despite being condemned to the travesty of surviving in the sachet economy. Try as they might, these sans-culottes will not be dining at the Asador de Aranda or the few pretentious restaurants festooned with Michelin stars, and some of them, sad to admit, will be consigned to pagpag cuisine. Irrational spending is to blame kung bakit hikahos ang mga manggagawa at magsasaka, not the exploitative system that condemns workers to wages barely enough to reproduce their labor power and efficiently produce the huge profit that capitalists amass.
Eli Jr. might have said it at the spur of the moment but the homo economicus who lives on a pittance has no choice under a system that refuses to recognize that all the economic data whipped up by state agencies suffer from one ignominious flaw: They justify the unjust and refuse to recognize that the figures they dish out, like the per capita income that raised the country’s status into an upper middle income country (UMIC) only serves as a guide in raising interest on WB loans since the economy has the capacity to pay. Economic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan gushed when the Philippines became an UMIC economy perhaps thinking that Manila has become richer than Beijing, which still gets concessional rates on its loans until 2031.
The real issue is not about consumer wastrels but penury considering that the minimum wage in Metro Manila down to the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim (BARMM) has a snowball’s chance in hell to be enough to buy a worker a decent meal at the corner carinderia. Indeed, as the independent IBON Foundation found out in May 2026, the minimum wages across all regions in the Philippines fall short of the poverty threshold for a family of five. According to wage.is, the minimum wage in the Philippines is P18,070 a month and it ranks as 155th out of 206 minimum wages worldwide. In dollar terms, the Philippine minimum wage is $326.43 monthly, which is not even 25% of the $1,188.57 average monthly wage in Asia.
With the actual average monthly minimum wage stands at P11,000, the Filipino worker cannot afford to be a compulsive buyer or an inveterate mall rat since the amount is 21% below the poverty threshold for a five-member household. Granting, for the sake of argument, that the worker in UMIC Philippines is better off, the damn statistics prove the opposite. The NCR minimum wage of P695 is still not enough to meet the P15,713 monthly poverty threshold for a family of the same size, based on 2023 data. For the edification of Gov. Remolona, nine of the country’s 17 regions pay starvation wages below the national average of P10,981. Using its family living wage formula, IBON estimated that a daily wage of P1,300 would suffice to meet the basic needs of a family of five.
Of course, Gov. Remolona might have been emboldened to talk glowingly of the claim by the state that the country has not only become an UMIC; it has also battled the demons that have impoverished Filipinos. As far as the cheapskates at the Department of Economic Planning and Development (DepDev) are concerned, the country has already bid farewell to poverty as its incidence dipped to 9.7% in 2025, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), another terrible agency that continues to promote a pauper’s diet as the real basis of poverty determination. PSA now believes, against science and reality, that the food expense per capita each day is P96.22 a day, meaning a family of five with an income slightly higher than P14,634 a month, are no longer poor. Statistics, like lawyers, also lie by setting impossible standards to please power holders while citizens suffer collywobbles at the dining table. What this leads us to is reinforced dogmatism, poverty bifurcated and dismal wages raised to the level of a rentier’s monthly take.
PSA’s manicured statistics mean that only 11.1 million citizens of the republic are poor, down from 17.5 million, or 15.5%, in 2023 and 19.9 million, or 18.1%, in 2021, the year before President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said he wanted to end his term with a 9% poverty incidence. Voila! he will get his wish in due time, once this Pax Silica steamrolls the bureaucracy and American masterminds get their diplomatic immunity in camera, nuclear power plants are built in Bataan to satisfy the imbudo-like craving for energy of AI data centers at the 1,620-hectare Pax Silica hub at the Clark Freeport Zone, the supposed surplus energy in Mindanao is transmitted to the Phividec area in Misamis Oriental for the nickel smelters of the US, and the more than 200 Aeta farmers in Capas, Tarlac to be shipped out, far beyond the sight of foreign investors. We kicked out the US bases in 1991. They are now back to manufacture AI chips, missile components and bomb parts and prospect for rare earths while exploiting what remains of the country’s nickel deposits. We never learn. #