Subjective Poverty and Affluence in the Philippines

In the Philippines, self-rated poverty and poverty thresholds have been measured at the national level since the mid-1980s, and are now being monitored from quarterly surveys, together with other subjective indicators of the quality of life. The self-rated poor are about twice as many as the poor officially defined. The official poverty line meets the subjective needs of only half of the self-rated poor. Self-rated poverty has a strong inverse relation to educational attainment, but is unconnected to gender and age of the household head. Surveys into food-poverty, hunger, and illness have been internally consistent. The rapidity of the tracking system has enabled short-run changes in poverty to become manifest.