Poverty estimation for cities and municipalities in the Philippines uses the Small Area Estimation (SAE) technique developed by the World Bank, which is called Census Empirical Best/Bayes (Census EB) estimation¹.

In order to produce reliable poverty estimates at the city and municipality level for 2021, the SAE methodology uses the results of the 2020 Census of Population and Housing, the merged data sets of the 2021 Family Income and Expenditure Survey and the January 2022 round of the Labor Force Survey, and the 2021 Updating of the List of Establishments. Other data explored was the 2021 Nighttime Lights Data taken from the Earth Observation Group of the Colorado School of Mines.

The 2021 SAE of Poverty produces estimates² for the 14 sub-municipalities in the City of Manila, 114 cities, and 1,484 municipalities with corresponding standard errors, coefficients of variation, and confidence intervals.

CLAIRE DENNIS S. MAPA, PhD 
Undersecretary
National Statistician and Civil Registrar General

Notes:

¹ The Census EB or Census Empirical Best/Bayes estimation was introduced in Paul Andres Corral Rodas, Isabel Molina & Minh Cong Nguyen (2021) “Pull your small area estimates up by the bootstraps “, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation

² Poverty estimates for the Highly Urbanized Cities (HUCs) and other cities in the National Capital Region are available from the official poverty statistics posted in the following link: https://psa.gov.ph/statistics/poverty/stat-tables/released/2021%20Full%20Year