Residents stand on a rooftop of a shanty tenement house while newly-built condominium buildings are seen in the background in Tondo district, Metro Manila, Philippines, March 11, 2018. Dondi Tawatao, Reuters



MANILA - Filipino optimism over their quality of life and their outlook on the economy dropped to a new record-low in years, a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey revealed Wednesday.

Fewer Filipinos at 36 percent expect their personal quality of life to improve in the next 12 months while 9 percent expect it to worsen according to the September 2018 survey.

This is equivalent to a net optimism score of +27 "high," 17 points lower from +44 "excellent" in June this year and the lowest since August 2012.

Fewer Filipinos are also optimistic that the Philippine economy would get better next year at 31 percent while 20 percent said they feel it would deteriorate.

This is equivalent to a net economic optimism score of +11 "very high" which is 19 points lower than the +30 "excellent" in June this year and the lowest since March 2015.

Net personal optimism according to SWS refers to expectations in personal quality of life while net economic optimism refers to expectations about the general Philippine economy.

GAINERS AND LOSERS

The survey also found that 28 percent of Filipinos said their lives improved over the past year (gainers) while 30 percent said their lives worsened (losers) for a net gainers score of -2 "fair."

This is 7 points below the +5 "high" in June 2018, and is the lowest since the -8 "fair" in September 2014.

SWS said this is the first time that the net gainers score falls to a negative after 14 consecutive quarterly positive scores since the first quarter of 2015.

The survey, conducted from Sept. 15 to 23 this year, was done using face-to-face interviews of 1,500 adults nationwide and has a ±3 percent sampling error margin for national percentages.

Inflation in the Philippines soared to its highest rate in almost 10 years. The 6.4-percent print smashed the 5.9 percent predicted by the Department of Finance and polls from Bloomberg and Reuters.

In a separate poll by Pulse Asia, inflation and higher pay for workers were the two top issues that majority of Filipinos wanted the government to act on.