(Continued from July 27, 2021)
I AM NOT really sure if someone in the government somehow missed out in the overall equation, but as far as I know, the cost of living has a direct effect on the ability of a household to be able to afford the imaginary basket of goods that is used to measure whether a household would fall below the poverty line or not.
Pardon my inquisitiveness, but I have also been curious about the question of whether the people who are earning only the minimum wage would be able to afford the imaginary basket of goods or not.
If the answer is yes, we would truly have a humungous problem because in effect, all those who are earning only the minimum wage would actually fall below the poverty line!
If you are alarmed by that, then you should even be alarmed by the possibility that all those who are earning below the minimum wage are not just “ordinarily poor”, because they might already be “extremely poor”!
Of course, these are just my speculations, but somehow, someway, we should get to the bottom of these concerns.
It could be said that the ways of the old days have been overtaken by new technologies. In the old days, censuses were taken every five years or so, to measure population growth as well as the incidence of poverty.
In the present days however, new technologies are available to conduct surveys on a daily and hourly basis. To a large extent, it could be said that the new technologies that are used to conduct surveys could also be used to have censuses taken on a yearly and monthly basis.
As I see it, it would be more practical to have censuses taken more frequently, because the prices of the items in the imaginary basket of goods would also change frequently.
As I remember it, the computations of the minimum wages by the RWBs were based on the Consumer Price Indices (CPIs) of the specific regions, an indication that the local prices of goods have a direct correlation with minimum wages.
Even if the government has practically abolished the regional computations of the minimum wages, it might want to look into the idea of determining the prices of the items in the imaginary basket of goods regionally, based on the regional CPIs. That way, it would be more grounded on the local realities.
To add to that, the government might want to look into the idea of tasking the provincial Governors to measure their own local poverty rates./PN
