The National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) said there is a need to “level up” economic growth and incomes to further cut poverty incidence, which dropped to 16.6 percent in 2018, from 23.3 percent in 2015.
Neda Undersecretary for Policy and Planning Rosemarie G. Edillon told the BusinessMirror on the sidelines of the poverty briefing on Friday that the expansion of the local construction sector between 2015 and 2018 fueled the government’s poverty reduction efforts.
Edillon said the construction sector would allow the Philippines to sustain its poverty reduction efforts at least until the end of the next administration.
“Obviously, there are only so many roads and bridges that we can build, so there really is a need to level up at some point. But for up until the next administration, [construction] will do as a main growth driver. However, we need to improve the skills of the work force so they go into higher-paying jobs,” she said.
Edillon said the construction boom brought about by the Duterte administration’s “Build, Build, Build” (BBB) program raised the incomes of the poor.
This, she said, is the reason for the faster increase in the incomes of the bottom 30 percent of the population compared to the income of the upper 70 percent. This eventually led to the reduction in the poverty rate between 2015 and 2018.
For those in the bottom 30 percent of the population, Neda Undersecretary for Regional Development and Officer in Charge Adoracion M. Navarro earlier said the mean per-capita income increased by 31.87 percent.
This growth, Navarro said, outpaced the 18-percent income expansion experienced by the top 20 percent of households.
Edillon also said the poor benefited from the construction boom as a driver of growth and poverty reduction as their skills were in demand among builders of roads and bridges.
“This is the first time we experienced this kind of poverty reduction. We thought poverty reduction between 2012 and 2015 was already large but this one [is larger]. It’s really the push for construction actually. It generated a lot of jobs and then the increase in the income,” she said.
The 2018 poverty incidence among individuals, or the proportion of poor Filipinos whose per-capita income is not sufficient to meet their basic food and nonfood needs, was estimated at 16.6 percent.
This translates to 17.6 million Filipinos who lived below the poverty threshold estimated at P10,727 per month, on average, for a family of five in 2018.
Among families, the proportion of poor families in 2018 was estimated at 12.1 percent, which is equivalent to around 3 million.
n terms of subsistence incidence among Filipinos, it was pegged at 5.2 percent in 2018. The monthly food threshold for a family of five was estimated, on average, at P7,528.
The subsistence incidence among families was recorded at 3.4 percent, or around 800,000 food poor families in 2018.
Subsistence incidence is the proportion of Filipinos whose income is not enough to meet even the basic food needs.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes