Poverty

Boo Chanco beat me to the punch with his column yesterday reporting on the economic effects of the agrarian reform program. His report is based on a discussion paper put out by Dean Raul Fabella of the UP School of Economics and circulated among fellows of the Foundation for Economic Freedom.

Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan on Monday said the government seeks to cut the poverty incidence in the Philippines to just 16.6 percent by 2016, the year President Benigno Aquino III steps down from office.

MANILA, Philippines—President Aquino has created a club of 30 poorest provinces that will receive increased funding and national government support between now and the end of his term in 2016.

The National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) has firmed up a poverty incidence target post-2015, which is up for final approval within the quarter, a ranking official said.

The 85 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest persons in the world. It’s hard to choose a single appropriate adjective for this statistic – depressing, frustrating, incredulous, and startling. And what would be the public reaction? It has ranged from anger at such inequality, to cynicism with…

MANILA, Philippines – Catholic bishops depicted yesterday poverty in the Philippines as a “social scandal.” In the pastoral letter “To Bring Glad Tidings to the Poor,” the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) asked Filipino Catholics to be more sensitive to the plight of the poor.

MANILA, Philippines—Malacañang acknowledged on Tuesday that the benefits of a strong economy had not trickled down to the poor, but it vowed to focus on job generation amid a recent survey that found a significant decrease in the quality of life of Filipinos.

Despite the country’s high economic growth, most Filipinos considered their quality of life, both at the national and personal levels, to have worsened in the previous 12 months, results of a Pulse Asia survey last December showed.

Some 3.9 million Filipino families experienced hunger in the last quarter of 2013, though hunger was “generally steady” as the year ended, according to a poll taken by Social Weather Stations.

THE UNITED Nations’ Millennium Development Goals are very specific targets agreed on by countries, including the Philippines. Most of these goals have a deadline by 2015 using 1990 as the baseline against which progress is gauged. These goals are:

MANILA, Philippines—The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) has launched a database to keep track of the progress of all antipoverty projects in the country.

Philippines – The Social Weather Stations(SWS) conducted its 4th quarter nationwide survey on self-rated poverty and self-rated food poverty and the results showed an increase in Filipino households considering themselves poor at the end of 2013.

Nearly 12 million households said they considered themselves poor as 2013 drew to a close, according to a new survey by pollster Social Weather Stations. According to the SWS survey, taken from Dec. 11 to 16 last year, 55 percent of respondents or 11.8 million families, said they were poor.

Poverty a big challenge despite robust economy Poverty remains a serious challenge despite the Philippine economy’s rapid pace of expansion in the past two years. The National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) reported Monday that 25.2 percent of the country’s population lived below the poverty line in 2012, only slightly better than the 26.3 percent in…

(Updated 2:35 p.m.) The Philippines appears to be proof that economic growth alone cannot reduce poverty. Despite stellar growth rates that have bested its Asian neighbors, the Philippines has not significantly lessened poverty in the last six years. If anything, the expansion of the country’s wealth has worsened income inequality.

MANILA, Philippines — Filipino families who said they were poor numbered 10.8 million in September, while a smaller number of 7.9 million families described themselves as poor in terms of food, according to a recent survey by Social Weather Stations (SWS).

MANILA, Philippines – The number of Filipino families who consider themselves mahirap or poor increased by 400,000 in the past three months, a recent survey by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) showed.

MANILA, Philippines – A ranking United Nations official and former vice president of Costa Rica has hailed the Philippine government through the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) for its conditional cash transfer program (CCT).

MANILA — With only two years to go before the 2015 deadline, the Philippine government’s efforts to reduce poverty and hunger might not be enough to attain the poverty and hunger targets set under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

Hunger, especially among the poor, rose in the second quarter of 2013 as 22.7 percent of respondents to a Social Weather Stations poll claimed to have experienced having nothing to eat in the last three months. This was equivalent to 4.9 million households going hungry.

MANILA, Philippines — The economy is growing, but who’s enjoying it? President Aquino’s financial managers painted a generally rosy picture of the economy as the House of Representatives formally began deliberations Wednesday on the proposed national budget for next year.

Fewer Filipino families considered themselves poor in the second quarter of 2013, but more claimed to be food-poor during the same period, according to a new survey by pollster Social Weather Stations.

MANILA, Philippines – The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) yesterday assured the people that the agency is using the most efficient and economical options in distributing cash grants to poor families under the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps).

When poverty figures and unemployment/underemployment continue to rise even with all the news reports about fresh investments and expansion plans in the country, then there is something wrong with the country’s economic development programs.

MANILA — Despite efforts of the government to increase funding for the farm sector, poverty incidence among agriculture households remain high.

Creating better jobs for Filipinos and reducing the underemployment rate by half to about 10 per cent over the next two years would help the Philippines achieve the nearly impossible 2015 Millennium Development Goal on poverty reduction, the country’s top economic manager said.

AS PRESIDENT Aquino marks the mid-point of his term, his forthcoming State of the Nation Address (SONA) is going to get more attention, and the hype from both sides of the political arena will be even more intense and exaggerated than usual. To try to keep things on a relatively even keel, the Movement for…

THE PHILIPPINES lags behind its neighbors in providing social protection, particularly for the poor, an Asian Development Bank (ADB) study showed.

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MANILA, Philippines – Despite robust economic growth so far this year and a series of international credit rating upgrades, inclusive growth and poverty alleviation still elude the Philippines.