Primary Reasons of Poverty of the Philippines

Official poverty statistics in the Philippines are part of the System of Designated Statistics instituted and implemented by the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) pursuant to Executive Order No. 352 signed on 01 July 1996. Based on policies approved by the NSCB, official poverty statistics consist of the food and poverty thresholds, the subsistence and poverty incidence, the income gap, the poverty gap, and the severity of poverty index. The estimates of subsistence and poverty incidence are expressed in terms of proportion of families and of the population.
Prior to 2000, the income gap, poverty gap and the severity of poverty index as well as the annual food and poverty thresholds were not part of the official poverty statistics. Under NSCB Board Resolution No. 9 Series of 2000, these statistics were added to the official poverty statistics designated to the NSCB under E. O. 352. Moreover, prior to 2003, the official poverty statistics were being generated only at the national and regional levels with urban-rural disaggregation. In response to user need for provincial disaggregation of poverty statistics, NSCB Resolution No. 1 Series of 2003 was passed on 15 January 2003, approving a methodology for the compilation of official poverty statistics.
This methodology underwent a series of discussions thru workshops, interagency meetings and users’ fora before it was approved by the NSCB. The initial efforts of the NSCB for the development of the methodology were undertaken in 1999 as part of the NSCB involvement in the “Development of an Integrated Poverty Monitoring and Indicator System Project”, a module of the UNDP-assisted project “Strengthening Institutional Mechanisms for the Convergence of Poverty Alleviation Efforts, Phase I”, which was implemented by NEDA.

Except for the food and poverty thresholds that are estimated annually, the other official poverty statistics are estimated every three years after the results of the Family Income and Expenditures Survey (FIES) of the National Statistics Office (NSO) have become available. The FIES is a nationwide survey of households undertaken to gather data on the income and expenditures of Filipino families.