City old-timers will probably recall the scene along an estero parallel to G. Araneta Avenue and E. Rodriguez Avenue in Quezon City.
There was a huge car assembly plant of an established American brand that stood on top of the waterway, but below it were informal settlers, or perhaps more accurately in the politically incorrect lingo of the time, a big squatter colony consisting of urban poor families living in ramshackle hovels.
Newspapers liked to publish the photograph of that scene to highlight the contrast between affluence and extreme poverty in the country – or the yawning gap between the rich and the poor.
Fast forward to 2022, and, well, that unforgettable image isn’t there anymore. The car assembly plant had moved elsewhere, perhaps because of acute embarrassment over their overpowering presence in an urban poor area.
Has the inequality narrowed down since then? Not so.
Recent research conducted by the international humanitarian aid agency Oxfam on the impact of COVID-19 showed that “rich and poor countries alike exacerbated an explosion of economic inequality since the start of the outbreak of the pandemic from 2020.
In their 2022 study that measured the Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) Index by looking at government policies and actions to fight inequality in the first two years of the pandemic by reviewing the spending, tax and labor policies and actions of 161 countries, the Philippines landed a “dismal” overall rank of 102nd.
While this was a slight improvement from 109th in 2020, the Philippines is still lagging behind other countries.
Based on the 2022 CRI Index, the country’s performance in “reducing inequality through progressive spending” on health, education, and social protection dropped from 99th in 2020 to 106th this year.
Compared to the 2020 CRI Index, the Philippines’ education budget was slashed by 15 percent. The health budget increased marginally, while the social protection budget increased by 28 percent.
“It’s quite disheartening though not unexpected to see how the Philippines fares compared to other countries when it comes to allotting resources to crucial public services such as education and health,” Oxfam said.
Oxfam pointed out that while the Philippines saw an increase in social protection this year, “it is still considered low compared to other countries,” especially when Filipinos have been grappling with joblessness and high cost of food and living expenses.
Essential health coverage, Oxfam said, is already lower than the regional average (excluding high-income countries or HICs) with about 55 percent of the population having no coverage of essential health care and being burdened by out-of-pocket health spending.
It said this “pushed more people into poverty, resulting in further inequality.”
“The results of the CRI Index show how much the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the widespread inequality that Filipinos have already been experiencing. To get out of this situation, the government will need to make immediate and impactful changes.”
These days, newspapers show the gap between the very rich and the very poor in this country by juxtaposing photos of the imposing skyscrapers and luxury sports cars in Bonifacio Global City and urban poor enclaves in certain parts of Manila and Quezon City.
Nothing much has changed, it seems, from many years past.