ICT For Development: Notes on Poverty and Poverty Alleviation in the Philippines

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Link to blogpost: http://raffysaldana.blogspot.com/2010/03/ict-for-development-notes-on-poverty.html

Note: I am currently involved in a project dealing with poverty reduction in one of the poorest regions of the world.

Starting today (March 19, 2010) I would like to write a series on "Poverty and Poverty Alleviation in the Philippines"

Part I. Notes on Poverty in the Philippines

Source: Poverty in the Philippines: Causes, Constraints, and Opportunities by the Asian Development Bank 2009

"Poverty and inequality have been recurrent challenges in the Philippines and have again come to the fore in the wake of the current global financial crisis and rising food, fuel, and commodity prices experiend in 2008."

Current Profile of Poverty in the Country
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* Poverty incidence among households increased from 24.4% in 2003 to 26.9% in 2006

* The number of poor families (households) increased from 4.0 million in 2003 to 4.7 million in 2006.

* The headcount index increased from 30.0% in 2003 to 32.9% in 2006

* The number of poor people increased from 23.8 million in 2003 to 27.6 million in 2006.

* According to the 2006 poverty data, Mindanao has the highest poverty incidence at 38.8% but Luzon has the highest number of poor families, with almost 2 million families (42.4% of the total).

* Self-rated poverty has ranged from 50% to 52% for most of the 2008, peaking at 59% (an estimated 10.6 million people) in the second quarter.

*Inequality has also been persistent over the years. Although the Gini coefficient improved to 0.4580 in 2006 from 0.4605 in 2003 and 0.4872 in 2000, the level of inequality remains hign compared with other countries in Asia has hardly changed for more tha 20 years.

*High inequality has limited the impact of economic growth on proverty reduction.

To be continued ...

Dr. Rafael P. Saldaña
Consultant on Evolutionary Trade, Agent-Based Modeling and Grid Computing
Asian Development Bank (ADB)
Associate Professor
Applied Mathematics and Computational Science
Mathematics Department
School of Science and Engineering
Ateneo de Manila University
Tel./Fax.: +63-2-4266125
Mobile: +63 928 5043121
E-mails: RSALDANA@ateneo.edu, RAFFYSALDANA@gmail.com
Blog: http://raffysaldana.blogspot.com/
19 March 2010
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