Guest of Honor and Speaker's Profile

Mahar Mangahas <mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph>, born 1944 in Manila, Philippines, is a Filipino economist who has done research on rice economics, land reform, poverty, hunger, income inequality, quality-of-life, governance, and public opinion. After primary and secondary schooling at the Ateneo de Manila, he obtained AB and MA degrees at the University of the Philippines (1962, 1965) and a PhD at the University of Chicago (economics, 1970).

Mangahas was on the faculty of the University of the Philippines in 1962-81, up to the rank of full Professor of Economics. He was UNICEF Consultant on Social Indicators for the Governments of Malaysia (1977-78) and Indonesia (1981), Vice-President for Research of the Development Academy of the Philippines (1981-84), Editor of the Philippine Economic Journal (1975-85), President of the Philippine Economic Society (1980), President of the Marketing and Opinion Research Society of the Philippines (1992), co-founder of the Philippine Agrarian Reform Foundation, co-founder of the Foundation for Economic Freedom, Philippine national representative of the World Association for Public Opinion Research or WAPOR (1995-2011), and board member of the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (2005-present).

In 1985, he co-founded and since then has been President of Social Weather Stations (www.sws.org.ph), the Philippines’ leading institute in quality-of-life monitoring, opinion polling, and social survey archiving. (SWS produces core indicators of Philppine well-being and governance based on its quarterly, nationwide, Social Weather Surveys. SWS is the Philippine member of the International Social Survey Program, the World Values Survey, Asian Barometer, and Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems, and is the Philippine field provider for the Gallup World Poll.)

Awards: (a) In 2001, the Helen Dinerman Award of the World Association for Public Opinion Research, its highest honor, for “championing the rights and freedoms of survey researchers in the Philippines,” after SWS successfully petitioned the Philippine Supreme Court to nullify a provision of the Fair Election Act banning the publication of pre-election surveys, for being a violation of the freedoms of speech and of expression. (b) In 2011, the University of Chicago Alumni Award for Public Service, for being “a powerful influence in helping to define a nation’s identity and to restore democracy by demonstrating the public will through numbers. … [His] work— much of which was done under difficult political circumstances — has led to important public dialogue and policy changes for his nation.” (c) In 2014, the Distinguished Research Fellow Award of the International Society for Quality of Life Studies, for career contributions to quality of life research.

Mangahas’ opinion column “Social Climate” appears in the Philippine Daily Inquirer (inquirer.net) every Saturday.