Poverty rate cut to 16.6% by 2015, By Angela Celis, August 22, 2012, Malaya Business Insight: “In three years, the Aquino government hopes to slash poverty incidence to 16.6 percent or half the 1991 poverty rate of 33.1 percent. According to economic planning secretary Arsenio Balisacan, the government can hack this considering that growth is high and that prices are not going up fast. To be poor means earning less than P16,841 a year which 26.5 percent of Filipinos fall under. The government aim is to bring more Filipinos out of poverty, overcoming the ‘lost decade’ -the regime of Macapagal-Arroyo when more Filipinos sank in poverty. Based on the official poverty statistics by the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB), the proportion of poor Filipinos to total population was 28.4 percent in 2000, 24.9 percent in 2003, 26.4 percent in 2006, and 26.5 percent in 2009. The government needs to reduce poverty rate by around two percentage points every year to meet the Millennium Development Goal of cutting the poverty figure into half by 2015…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty