and the winner is...

The beginning of every year means a lot of things. New beginnings. Spring semester. A rerun of annual holidays. Fireworks on January 1st. And most importantly...

Updated statistics.

The release of the 2007 version of the World Development Indicators (WDI) concludes that the growing inequality in the Philippines has established 15M people living on less than $1 a day.

The less painful statistic, people living on at least $2 a day amounted to approximately 43M. Who knew that the extra dollar would yield a gap of at least 28M people.

Despite the qualification associated with perceiving the state of a single country or the rest of the world, the WDI data provides a "detailed picture of the world." It does not take a case-by-case study of each statistic to prove that poverty is a major problem for the country, and that little has changed in the data over the years.

Like almost all the post-Martial Law politicians, tackling the problem of uneven growth is going to a major factor in this year's midterm elections.