2012 Municipal and City Level Poverty Estimates Republic of the Philippines Philippine Statistics Authority 2012 Municipal and City Level Poverty Estimates CAR Region I Region II Region III Region IV-A NCR Region V Region VIII Region IV-B Region VI Region VII Region X Caraga Region IX Region XI ARMM Region XII The 2012 Municipal and City Level Poverty Estimates is a major output of the Project on the Generation of 2012 Small Area Estimates of Poverty implemented by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). 31 May 2016 Philippines 2012 Municipal and City Level Poverty Estimates is a publication prepared by the Poverty and Human Development Statistics Division of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). For technical inquiries, please contact us at: (632) 376-1991 or email us at [email protected]. TERMS OF USE OF PSA PUBLICATIONS The PSA reserves its exclusive right to reproduce all its publications in whatever form. Any part of this publication should not be reproduced, recopied, lent or repackaged for other parties for any commercial purposes without written permission from the PSA. Any part of this publication may only be reproduced for internal use of the recipient/customer company. Should any portion of the data in this publication be included in a report/article, the title of the publication and the PSA as publisher should be cited as the source of the data. Any information derived from the processing of data contained in this publication will not be the responsibility of PSA. Published by the Philippine Statistics Authority PSA CVEA Building East Avenue, Diliman Quezon City Philippines 31 May 2016 The 2012 Municipal and City Level Poverty Estimates is available in electronic formats (Excel/Word/PDF in CDRom). For details, please contact us at (632) 890-8456 or at [email protected]. FOREWORD This report features the 2012 municipal and city level poverty estimates in the country as part of the output of the Project on the Generation of the 2012 Small Area Estimates of Poverty, which is a government-funded project implemented by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). It is a follow-up study to the earlier projects of the former National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB, now part of the PSA) on Poverty Mapping in the Philippines Project, the Intercensal Updating of Small Area Poverty Estimates Project, and the Project on the Generation of 2006 and 2009 Small Area Estimates of Poverty. These earlier projects were funded through the World Bank (WB) - Asia Europe Meeting Trust Fund, WB Trust Fund for Statistical Capacity Building, Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and the Philippine Government. These projects generated municipal and city level poverty estimates for 2000, 2003, and 2006 and 2009 respectively, using small area estimation (SAE) technique. Similar to the earlier projects, the SAE technique used is the Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw (ELL), a method developed by the WB wherein the survey and census data conducted on the same year are combined to produce reliable poverty estimates at lower levels of geographic disaggregation. As in the previous projects, the ELL method was modified to come up with estimates even during intercensal years. We would like to express our deepest appreciation to our Project Technical Resource Person, Dr. Zita VJ. Albacea of the Philippine Statistical Research and Training Institute (PSRTI) for her valuable guidance and assistance and to our Project’s Technical Adviser, Dr. Romulo A. Virola, for his significant recommendations and active participation in the Project activities. We acknowledge their untiring efforts in helping us with this Project, which will hopefully contribute to the improvement of the Philippine Statistical System (PSS). This report also highlights the validation exercises and consultations done with the local government units, and provides the actual policy uses of the small area poverty estimates in the Philippines emphasizing the relevance of the project outputs to national and local policymaking. More specifically, the municipal and city level poverty estimates were used by several national and local government agencies in their policymaking and program planning, e.g., the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s (DSWD) use of the SAE of poverty as basis for the identification of areas for the Kapit- Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan- Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services (KALAHI- CIDSS), the Pantawid Pamilya Program and the Sustainable Livelihood Program (SLP). It is hoped that the results of this project will further help local communities, policymakers and program implementers in the formulation of appropriate programs and improvements in targeting schemes aimed at reducing poverty. LISA GRACE S. BERSALES, PhD National Statistician and Civil Registrar General . Table of Contents Page I. Introduction 1 II. 2012 Municipal and City Level Poverty Estimates 5 III. Actual Policy Uses A. Policy Formulation, Planning and Monitoring 11 B. Targeting Beneficiaries of Programs/Projects 12 IV. Conclusions and Recommendations 14 V. Annex A. Definition of Terms 19 B. Methodology 1. Background 20 2. Data Sources 23 3. Implementation of the Methodology a. Introduction/Background 25 b. Selection of Explanatory Variables 26 c. Statistical Modeling 35 d. Development and Selection of Regional Models 36 e. Comparison of Estimates 38 4. Limitations of the Study 38 C. Validation Workshops 1. Objectives 42 2. Mechanics 42 3. Forms Used 45 4. Findings 47 D. Advocacy 47 E. Lessons Learned 51 F. 2012 Municipal and City Level Poverty Estimates 52 References Project Staff I. Introduction Poverty reduction remains the overarching goal of the Philippine government. The main vision of the Philippine Development Plan (PDP) 2011-2016 is to achieve rapid, sustainable and inclusive growth that will generate employment opportunities and reduce poverty. The PDP 2011-2016 Midterm Update further recognized the need for fine- tuning strategies on poverty reduction to unleash the potential of all sectors in the areas and communities where the poorest and most vulnerable are found. This is also in consonance with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and its successor, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which embodies specific targets and milestones in eliminating extreme poverty worldwide. While MDG 1 aims to halve the poverty rate in 2015 from its baseline rate in 1990, the SDG 1 envisions eradicating extreme poverty for all people everywhere by 2030. Recognizing that poverty reduction is a long-term program that requires uninterrupted growth over a reasonable length of time, the generation of more frequent, timely and relevant national and sub-national poverty statistics are deemed critical inputs to achieve this objective. Official poverty statistics in the country are generated by the former National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB), now part of the Philippine Statistics Authority1 (PSA), in accordance with Executive Order (EO) No. 352, Designation of Statistical Activities that will Generate Critical Data for Decision-making of the Government and Private Sector. The official poverty estimation methodology is developed by the Technical Committee on Poverty Statistics, which has a multi-sectoral representation consisting of noted experts in poverty measurement coming from the academe, producers and users of poverty statistics from both government and non-government organizations. Official poverty statistics released by the PSA include national, regional and provincial poverty estimates directly estimated from the triennial Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES). Further, starting 2013, national poverty estimates are also generated using the results of the Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS), which is conducted in years when the FIES is not conducted. These poverty estimates are defined and estimated in line with Republic Act (RA) 8425, the Social Reform and Poverty Alleviation Act, which refers to 1 The Philippine Statistics Authority was established on 12 September 2013 by virtue of Republic Act 10625, otherwise known as the “Philippine Statistical Act of 2013”, which merged the major statistical agencies engaged in primary data collection and compilation of secondary data, namely: National Statistics Office (NSO); National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB); Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS); and Bureau of Labor and Employment Statistics (BLES). 2012 Municipal and City Level Poverty Estimates Page 1 the poor as those families and individuals whose income fall below the poverty threshold and who cannot afford to provide for their minimum basic needs in a sustained manner. The increasing clamour for lower disaggregation of poverty statistics for better targeted poverty reduction programs has been recognized by the former NSCB as it embarked on a Poverty Mapping Project with funding assistance from the World Bank Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM) Trust Fund in 2004. This Project made possible the release of 2000 poverty estimates for all the 1,622 municipalities and cities in the country through small area estimation in 2005. Small area estimation is a statistical methodology that allows the estimation at lower levels of disaggregation by combining information collected from a survey with data from other sources such as the census. A variant of this methodology, called the Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw (ELL) Method, was applied in the Project using the 2000 Census of Population and Housing (CPH), 4th Round of the 2000 Labor