Poverty incidence in the Philippines dropped to 21.6 percent of the population in 2015 from 25.2 percent in 2012 and 26.3 percent in 2009, the Philippine Statistics Authority said Thursday.
The National Economic and Development Authority said this meant there were 1.8 million less poor Filipinos last year, compared to 2012. This also put the Duterte administration’s goal to reduce poverty rate to 17 percent by 2022 on track.
“We’re confident that it can be reduced so much more, especially now since we are coming from a much lower base which is at 21.6 percent. And from 2012 to 2015, that’s actually a 3.6-percentage point reduction over a period of three years,” Neda assistant director-general Rosemarie Edillon said.
“And since we want to up the ante a bit, then we’re looking at something like a 1.25 percentage point reduction every year, and that brings us to about 13 percent to 15 percent by 2022,” she said.
Edillon said the poverty incidence was within the target set in the Philippine Development Plan, which was 20 percent to 23 percent for the year that resulted from a generally low and stable inflation, improved income and higher employment rate.
“Even so, the rate of poverty reduction between 2012 and 2015 could have been faster, if not for the major shocks, especially the intermittent typhoons and El Niño that adversely affected agricultural production, rural incomes and food prices,” Edillon said.
Neda said the decline in poverty became more pronounced in recent years. Data showed there were about 1.4 million less poor Filipinos in 2015 than in 2009.
Among families, poverty incidence also fell to a record-low of 16.5 percent in 2015 from 19.7 percent in 2012 and 21 percent in 2006.
The subsistence incidence, which measures extreme poverty, was reduced by more than half as of 2015, attaining the target of halving extreme poverty under the first Millennium Development Goal.
This signifies improvements in the quality of living conditions, which may indicate that the government’s programs and projects, such as the conditional cash transfer program, have been gaining traction, according to Neda.
The magnitude or the extent of the reduction in poverty incidence also improved between 2012 and 2015 by 3.6 percentage points, compared to 1.1 ppts ibetween 2009 and 2012.
Neda said the faster decline in poverty rate was supported by significant improvements in incomes, particularly among lower income groups.
It said while the growth of per capita income in nominal terms accelerated, consumer price inflation decreased from 12.1 percent in 2009-2012 to 9.5 percent in 2012-2015.
“This means that in real terms, average incomes are growing at a faster rate in the last three years, which is likely to have contributed to poverty reduction,” Neda said.
Data showed that from 2012 to 2015, the per capita income of the bottom three deciles of households grew 24.3 percent, and faster than the 15.8-percent average growth for all income groups and 12 percent for the top 20-percent income group.