As earnings rose across all income levels except among the top 10 percent of families, and across all regions except in Metro Manila, CALABARZON, and Northern Mindanao, poverty among Filipino families dropped by almost three percentage points from the 27.5 percent revised estimate for 2000 down to 24.7 percent in 2003. These are based on the new set of poverty estimates released by the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB).
NSCB Secretary General Romulo Virola said the latest official poverty data indicate that in 2003, about 3.966 million families, less than a quarter of the country’s total families, were living below the poverty line. These figures represent a decrease from the corresponding 2000 levels of 4.138 million families then straining to make ends meet.
The three regions with the highest proportion of poor families in 2003 were all in Mindanao, namely CARAGA with 47.3 percent, the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) with 45.7 percent, and Western Mindanao (Region IX) with 44.1 percent. At the brighter end of the beam, the three regions with the lowest poverty incidence are all located in Luzon, namely, the National Capital Region (NCR) with 5.0 percent, and its neighboring regions - Central Luzon (Region III) with 13.7 percent, and the CALABARZON area (Region IV-A) with 14.9 percent.
The country’s annual per capita poverty threshold reached PhP12,267 in 2003, up by 7.1 percent compared to the revised 2000 level of PhP11,451. Thus, a family of five members should have an income of at least PhP5,111 a month to be able to sustain their minimum basic needs, both food and non-food.
Meanwhile, the annual per capita food threshold increased from PhP7,707 in 2000 to PhP8,134 in 2003, up by 5.5 percent during the period. Subsistence incidence, or the proportion of families with per capita income below the food threshold, stood at 10.4 percent in 2003, exhibiting a decrease of almost two percentage points from 12.3 percent in 2000. This means that in 2003, about 1.664 million families did not earn enough income to provide for their basic food requirements, representing a drop from the 2003 level of 1.850 million families.
Virola said these poverty measures were computed based on the poverty estimation methodology approved by the NSCB Executive Board in January 2003 with some modifications necessitated by the change in the design of the 2003 Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), the main source of income and expenditure data used for poverty estimation. The FIES is a regular survey conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO) every three years. The NSO is expected to release the details of the final survey results for 2003 in early February.
He added that the methodology used by the NSCB and the resulting estimates underwent an open and rigorous review and evaluation through a series of meetings conducted by the Technical Committee on Poverty Statistics from October 2004 to January 2005. The Committee has a multisectoral representation consisting of noted experts in the area of poverty statistics and is headed by Dr. Celia Reyes of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies. Due to the limitations of the new master sample used in the FIES, which shifted the sampling domain from provinces to regions, the Technical Committee recommended the release of only the national and regional poverty estimates. It is now conducting an overall review of the country’s poverty estimation methodology and is targeting to come up with a revised methodology by the end of 2005, which would allow the generation of provincial-level poverty estimates, notwithstanding the design limitations of the FIES.
Other details of the new poverty estimates are available at the poverty page of the NSCB website, http://www.nscb.gov.ph. –PIA-CAR