(Following is the transcript of the segment "Analysis by Winnie Monsod," which aired on News on Q on July 6, 2009. Prof. Winnie Monsod is the resident analyst of News on Q, which airs weeknights at 9:30 p.m. on Q Channel 11.)

President Arroyo has done better than her predecessors have as far as growth is concerned, fared badly in reducing poverty.


The State of the Nation Address or SONA that the President will be delivering on July 27 will be her ninth and last one.

No other President, except the dictator Marcos, who sat as President for more than 20 years, has held the presidency as long, and this being her valedictory, the SONA will surely deal with her administration's accomplishments.

Because this is a run-up to the national elections in 2010, more than the usual effort will be made by the administration to present its performance in the best possible light, while the opposition will be doing the exact opposite.

So, from a non-partisan viewpoint, what can be said about the performance of the Arroyo administration?

Let's start with broad strokes.

If we set as our metric the broad goals of economic growth and poverty reduction, and use as a basis of comparison the performance of her predecessors, here is what we find: in terms of the country's economic growth, President Arroyo has done better than her predecessors have, as we can see.

The average GDP growth rate of the country between 2001 and 2006 was 4.5, higher than that achieved by the others. I am not including GDP rate for 2001 and 2008 because as we will see our latest poverty estimates are 2006.

But if she did better than her predecessors as far as growth is concerned, she performed worse in the field of poverty reduction - as again we can see.

On a fixed level of living or consistent basic needs basis, poverty incidence went down by 6.5 percent during Mrs. Aquino's watch, it went further down by another 9.5% during Mr. Ramos' watch.

Under Mr. Estrada's watch, however, the percentage of people who were living below the poverty line increased and under Mrs. Arroyo's watch, poverty incidence first declined between 2000 and 2003, and then it increased such that the number of poor families increased by 650,000 and the number of poor people increased by 3.8 million people, between 2003 and 2006, so that for that whole period, there was no significant change in poverty, and the absolute number of the poor increased.

Now having done the broad strokes, let's get into a little more detail, to find out why the broad strokes look that way.

This time, we will compare her performance not against the performance of her predecessors, but against what she herself set out to accomplish, as stated in her administration's Medium Term Philippine Development Plan (MTPDP) for 2004-2010.

According to the MTPDP, and I quote: "By 2010, this will be the 10-point legacy of the Arroyo administration:

1. Ten million jobs shall have been created.

2. Everyone of school age will be in school. Three thousand school buildings a year shall have been built and a computer put in every high school.

3. The budget shall have been balanced with the right revenues collected and spending on the right things ensured.

4. The network of transport and digital infrastructure on which the Arroyo government embarked in 2002 shall have linked the entire country by 2010.

5. Power and water shall have been regularly provided to the entire country.

6. Metro Manila will have been decongested with economic activity growing and spreading to new centers of government, business and community in Luzon, in the Visayas, and in Mindanao.

7. The Subic-Clark corridor will have become the most competitive international service and logistics center in the Southeast Asian region.

8. Elections will no longer raise a doubt about their integrity.
The electoral process will have been completely computerized.

9. Peace will have come to Mindanao and all insurgency areas.

10. The divisive issues generated by EDSA 1, 2 and
3 will have had a just closure."

These all by 2010.

Rearranging these 10 targets results in the acronym "BEAT THE ODDS," which the Arroyo administration has used as its mantra.

Did she indeed beat the odds? We'll answer that in part 2 of our pre-SONA analysis next week.