KEY FINDINGS Overcoming Poverty and Inequality in the Philippines: Past, Present, and Prospects for the Future
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- The Philippines has made significant progress in reducing poverty, but income inequality has only recently begun to fall. Thanks to high growth rates and structural transformation, between 1985 and 2018 poverty fell by two-thirds. However, income inequality did not begin to decline until 2012. It is still high: the top 1 percent of earners together capture 17 percent of national income, with only 14 percent being shared by the bottom 50 percent.
- Several structural factors contribute to the persistence of inequality. The expansion of secondary education and mobility to better-paying jobs, citizen ownership of more assets and access to basic services, and government social assistance have helped reduce inequality since the mid-2000s. However, unequal opportunities, lack of access to tertiary education and a scarcity of skills, coupled with inequality in returns to college education, gendered social norms and childcare, and spatial gaps, sustain inequality.
- Inequality of opportunity limits the potential for upward mobility. While there has been considerable progress in expanding access to basic services such as electricity, safe drinking water, and school enrollment, large disparities limit the development of human capital. Inequality of opportunity and low intergenerational mobility waste human potential, resulting in a lack of innovation and a misallocation of human capital in the economy.
- While schooling is widely accessible, its quality and attainment vary by income group. Children from poorer households are less likely to be enrolled and, if they are, to reach age-appropriate grade levels. That means they are less likely to reach tertiary education, which severely constrains their earning potential and their prospects for upward mobility. With the relatively low share of workers with tertiary education, the premium for college education has remained high. Additionally, tertiary education tends to deliver much higher returns for rich than poor households, possibly due to differences in school quality or f ields of study and employment.
- COVID-19 partly reversed decades-long gains in reducing poverty and inequality. The pandemic halted economic growth momentum in 2020, and unemployment shot up in industries that require inperson work. In 2021, poverty rose to 18.1 percent despite large government assistance. The economy has begun to rebound but signs are emerging that the recovery will be uneven. Prolonged loss of income has taken a heavy toll on the poorest households. With food prices going up and a reliance on adverse coping strategies, among them eating less, there is a risk of serious consequences for the health and nutrition of children in vulnerable households.
- The shock from the COVID-19 pandemic led to a shift in the workforce to less productive sectors and occupations. Employment in wage work has notably decreased and employment in agriculture has risen. These trends have been concentrated among youth and the least educated, which suggests an uneven recovery and widening income inequality.
- The pandemic is likely to result in long-term scarring of human capital development. Over half of households estimate that their children learned from remote learning less than half what they would have learned from face-to-face schooling. The proportion increases to 68 percent in poor households. Extended distance learning is expected to have reduced the learning-adjusted years of schooling by over a full year. Learning loss, combined with the de-skilling associated with prolonged unemployment, could lead to sizable future earnings losses.
- Job polarization could further increase as the nature of work changes. Job polarization among wage workers emerged between 2016 and 2021: employment in middle-skilled occupations went down and employment in both low-skilled and high-skilled occupations went up. This pattern may rise with the transformation of jobs post-COVID-19 and could increase prevailing disparities in incomes.
- Policy can reduce inequality by supporting employment and workers, improving education access and quality, promoting inclusive rural development, strengthening social protection mechanisms, and addressing inequality of opportunity.
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Philippines has a high rate of poverty, with 16% of people in the Philippines living in a state of poverty and as stated by the Asian Development Bank (2018), 16.7% of the population live below ...
Drawing from theories on surplus value, labor exploitation, and economic dependency, this paper will present an updated critique of the official poverty line in the Philippines and how official ...
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO. 2020-22 AUGUST 2020 Poverty, the Middle Class, and Income Distribution ... * The first three authors are senior research fellows at the Philippine Institute for ... For instance, the Asian Development Bank expects the Philippine economy to grow at 2.0% in 2020 (ADB 2020), while the International Monetary Fund ...
1. Poverty that is concrete in the web or multi-dimensionalities of vulnerability, humiliation, distance, sickness or ill-being, hunger, isolation, powerlessness, and insecurity among others correlate to the extent social and economic rights are advanced and protected in a democratic society. 2.
According to the Bor gen Project Organization (2020), The. Philippines has a high rate of poverty, with 16% of people in the Philippines living in a state of. poverty and as stated by the Asian ...
In the past three decades, the Philippines has made remarkable progress in reducing poverty. Driven by high growth rates and structural transformation, the poverty rate fell by two-thirds, from 49.2 percent in 1985 to 16.7 percent in 2018. By 2018, the middle class had expanded to nearly 12 million people and the economically secure population had risen to 44 million.
DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES NO. 2020-55 DECEMBER 2020 Mitigating the Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Poverty Celia M. Reyes, Ronina D. Asis, Arkin A. Arboneda, and Anna Rita P. Vargas The PIDS Discussion Paper Series constitutes studies that are preliminary and subject to further revisions. They are being circulated in a limited number of copies ...
areas as poverty incidence, vulnerability to poverty, as well as the underlying mechanism of savings, labor supply and earnings of parents and human capital investments. These results are expected to complement those of aggregate-level † Senior Research Fellow, Philippine Institute for Development Studies ([email protected]). This
Overall poverty rate is also targeted to decline from 21.6 percent to 14.0 percent in 2022 - equivalent to lifting about 6 million Filipinos out of poverty. Moreover, the country has committed to the Sustainable Development Goals, where the first goal is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.
Using the Philippine Family Income and Expenditure Survey, we estimated national and regional Epanechnikov kernel densities to understand how poverty evolved from 2000 to 2015. Results indicated that improvements in Philippine poverty incidence are attributable to various government poverty alleviation programs and to improvements in the ...
There are serious resource gaps for poverty reduction and the attainment of the MDGs by 2015; Multidimensional responses to poverty reduction are needed; and; Further research on chronic poverty is needed. The report comprehensively analyzes the causes of poverty and recommends ways to accelerate poverty reduction and achieve more inclusive growth.
RESEARCH ARTICLE Winning the War on Poverty: Tracking Living Standards in the Philippines Using a Class of Axiomatic Indices John Paolo R. Rivera Asian Institute of Management, Makati City, Philippines [email protected] Poverty has persistently badgered the Philippines and alleviating it has been the fundamental thrust of government. However,
Office of the President of the Philippines Poverty Alleviation Strategies in the Philippines National Anti-Poverty Commission Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), its Board of Directors, or the governments they represent.
This paper is a systematic review of the theories distilled from the contemporary literatures on rural poverty in the Philippines. There are five sociological theories which explainsthe rural ...
1. Introduction. Poverty "is one of the defining challenges of the 21st Century facing the world" (Gweshengwe et al., Citation 2020, p. 1).In 2019, about 1.3 billion people in 101 countries were living in poverty (United Nations Development Programme and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Citation 2019).For this reason, the 2030 Global Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals ...
household welfare in estimating poverty in the country. (PSA [2020]) This study explores alternative welfare aggregates in the poverty estimation in the Philippines. Using the 2018 FIES, we compare three welfare measures--pretax income, disposable income, and consumption, and investigate which three accurately identify the poor households.
Child Poverty in the Philippines V Foreword The Global Study on Child Poverty and Dispari es was launched by the United Na ons Children's Fund (UNICEF) in 2007, and has since evolved to include research studies from 54 countries on their respec ve vulnerable groups, including children, and their rights.
According to the head count poverty index, poverty incidence declined from 75 per cent in 1961 to 62 per cent in 1971, to 58 per cent in 1985 and to 49 per cent in 1988. The average poverty gap over the whole population was about 40 per cent in 1961, 30 per cent in 1971 and 17 per cent in 1988.
33 ADB Projections for Poverty Incidence by 2020 42 34 Philippines Growth Forecast for 2009 (as of April) 43 35 Unemployment Rates in East Asia, 2003-2007 43 ... author is also grateful to Christian Mina and Melinda Romero for research assistance and to Madeline Dizon for overall administrative assistance. viii Poverty in the Philippines ...
xii Poverty in the Philippines: Income, Assets and Access Income Poverty and Inequality Analysis of income poverty trends in the Philippines must begin with a word of caution as a result of methodology changes over time. Comparisons of poverty data across time cannot be made without first ensuring that the data is based on the same assumptions.
About 32% of slum population (or less than a million people) are poor based on national poverty lines of P20,688 per capita (Table 5).The balance consists of the environmentally poor households living above the poverty line who can spend between $2 and $4 per day but reside in poor living environment.
Expand. 26. PDF. Despite the remarkable economic performance of the Philippines in recent years, poverty remains a core policy issue. And with a relatively young population, the poverty situation concerns largely children who are at the critical stages of their physical, mental, and social development. This report provides a comprehensive ...
Poverty: A Literature Review of the Concept, Measurements, Causes and the Way Forward. July 2021. International Journal of Research in Business and Social Science (2147-4478) 11 (15):93-111. DOI ...