NSCB Resolution No. 5
Series of 2005

APPROVING THE INTERIM MODIFICATIONS
IN THE OFFICIAL ESTIMATION METHODOLOGY
FOR THE 2003 POVERTY STATISTICS

WHEREAS, reducing poverty remains the overarching goal of the government;

WHEREAS, there is an immediate need to release the 2003 poverty statistics to serve as a tool for effective implementation and monitoring of the government’s poverty reduction programs;

WHEREAS, the existing poverty estimation methodology, as approved by the NSCB Executive Board on 15 January 2003 through NSCB Resolution No. 1 (Series of 2003), adopts region-based menus costed out using provincial prices and requires that provincial-level estimates of poverty statistics be generated and released regularly;

WHEREAS, three regions have been created and 23 provinces have either shifted regions or been created since 1988 when the regional menus were developed by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute;

WHEREAS, NSCB Resolution No. 1-2003 did not provide any specific rules to follow in deciding which menus to use for these new regions and provinces, and for those provinces that have been transferred to other regions;

WHEREAS, the adoption of the new master sample in the 2003 Family Income and Expenditures Survey (FIES), which shifted the sampling domain from provinces to regions, affected the precision/reliability of the provincial poverty estimates and precluded the generation of urban-rural disaggregated poverty estimates for five provinces with no sample urban barangays (Abra, Batanes, Marinduque, Siquijor, and Southern Leyte);

WHEREAS, the preliminary provincial poverty estimates exhibit large fluctuations in the poverty incidences of some provinces that require a thorough validation to ensure the reliability of the provincial estimates;

WHEREAS, the Technical Committee on Poverty Statistics (TC-PovStat) conducted a series of meetings from October 2004 to January 2005 to review the results of the computational exercises jointly undertaken by the NSCB and the National Statistics Office (NSO) and to discuss the necessary action and recommendations regarding the 2003 poverty estimates;

WHEREAS, the TC recommended the following interim modifications on the official estimation methodology to be used for the 2003 poverty statistics:

(1) Adopt a single regional menu across years for each province, regardless of whether it has shifted regions, and specifically, using the regional configuration in January 2003 when the first provincial-level poverty estimates were released and which was based on Republic Acts 6734, 6766, 7901, 7160, and 7878, as basis for assigning regional menus to the provinces;

(2) For the five provinces with no sample urban barangays, adopt an alternative weighting scheme using the share of urban and rural population to the total population in each province to come up with the estimate of the overall provincial food threshold;

(3) The five provinces with no sample urban barangays will be excluded in the derivation of the urban-rural disaggregated poverty estimates for the regions under which the five provinces are classified, namely, CAR and Regions II, IV-B, VII, and VIII, but this should be properly noted in the tables to be released;

(4) The five provinces with no sample urban barangays will be excluded in the derivation of the urban-rural disaggregated national estimate of poverty; and

(5) Release only national and regional level estimates of poverty for 2003 as preliminary figures with documentation on the metadata and limitations of the methodology;

WHEREAS, major users of poverty statistics, such as the National Economic and Development Authority and the National Anti-Poverty Commission, support the recommendation of the TC;

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED AS IT IS HEREBY RESOLVED, that the Board approve the recommendation of the TC-PovStat to adopt the interim modifications on the official estimation methodology as enumerated above to be used for the 2003 poverty statistics;

BE IT RESOLVED FURTHER, that the TC-PovStat conduct an overall review of the poverty estimation methodology and come up with a revised methodology by the end of 2005, which would allow the generation of provincial-level poverty estimates, notwithstanding the design limitations of the FIES.

Approved this 24th day of January 2005, in Pasig City.

Attested by:

ROMULO A. VIROLA
Secretary General