research question about poverty in the philippines

KEY FINDINGS Overcoming Poverty and Inequality in the Philippines: Past, Present, and Prospects for the Future

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• The Philippines has made significant progress in reducing poverty, but income inequality has only recently begun to fall. Thanks to high growth rates and structural transformation, between 1985 and 2018 poverty fell by two-thirds. However, income inequality did not begin to decline until 2012. It is still high: the top 1 percent of earners together capture 17 percent of national income, with only 14 percent being shared by the bottom 50 percent.
• Several structural factors contribute to the persistence of inequality. The expansion of secondary education and mobility to better-paying jobs, citizen ownership of more assets and access to basic services, and government social assistance have helped reduce inequality since the mid-2000s. However, unequal opportunities, lack of access to tertiary education and a scarcity of skills, coupled with inequality in returns to college education, gendered social norms and childcare, and spatial gaps, sustain inequality.
• Inequality of opportunity limits the potential for upward mobility. While there has been considerable progress in expanding access to basic services such as electricity, safe drinking water, and school enrollment, large disparities limit the development of human capital. Inequality of opportunity and low intergenerational mobility waste human potential, resulting in a lack of innovation and a misallocation of human capital in the economy.
• While schooling is widely accessible, its quality and attainment vary by income group. Children from poorer households are less likely to be enrolled and, if they are, to reach age-appropriate grade levels. That means they are less likely to reach tertiary education, which severely constrains their earning potential and their prospects for upward mobility. With the relatively low share of workers with tertiary education, the premium for college education has remained high. Additionally, tertiary education tends to deliver much higher returns for rich than poor households, possibly due to differences in school quality or f ields of study and employment.
• COVID-19 partly reversed decades-long gains in reducing poverty and inequality. The pandemic halted economic growth momentum in 2020, and unemployment shot up in industries that require inperson work. In 2021, poverty rose to 18.1 percent despite large government assistance. The economy has begun to rebound but signs are emerging that the recovery will be uneven. Prolonged loss of income has taken a heavy toll on the poorest households. With food prices going up and a reliance on adverse coping strategies, among them eating less, there is a risk of serious consequences for the health and nutrition of children in vulnerable households.
• The shock from the COVID-19 pandemic led to a shift in the workforce to less productive sectors and occupations. Employment in wage work has notably decreased and employment in agriculture has risen. These trends have been concentrated among youth and the least educated, which suggests an uneven recovery and widening income inequality.
• The pandemic is likely to result in long-term scarring of human capital development. Over half of households estimate that their children learned from remote learning less than half what they would have learned from face-to-face schooling. The proportion increases to 68 percent in poor households. Extended distance learning is expected to have reduced the learning-adjusted years of schooling by over a full year. Learning loss, combined with the de-skilling associated with prolonged unemployment, could lead to sizable future earnings losses.
• Job polarization could further increase as the nature of work changes. Job polarization among wage workers emerged between 2016 and 2021: employment in middle-skilled occupations went down and employment in both low-skilled and high-skilled occupations went up. This pattern may rise with the transformation of jobs post-COVID-19 and could increase prevailing disparities in incomes.
• Policy can reduce inequality by supporting employment and workers, improving education access and quality, promoting inclusive rural development, strengthening social protection mechanisms, and addressing inequality of opportunity.

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What Has Really Happened to Poverty in the Philippines?: New Measures Evidence and Policy Implications

July 31, 2013.

Poverty is increasingly recognized as a multidimensional phenomenon, yet its assessment continues to be conducted almost exclusively in terms of income (or expenditure). This practice is prevalent partly because low household incomes are casually associated with other deprivation indicators, such as low levels of literacy and life expectancy.

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Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities: the Case of the Philippines

In a country where poverty is prevalent, a significant number of children are likely to be illiterate, malnourished, and prone to abuse and physical violence. The Philippines is no different. Using known indicators on education, social protection, poverty, and health, this report summarizes the Filipino children's welfare and living conditions taking account the disparities in gender, income, and geographic location. This report shows that poverty incidence among children living in rural areas is more than twice that of children living in the urban areas. Looking at the regional patterns, some regions are consistently ranked as being 'worse off' compared to other regions. All these suggest wide disparities in poverty incidence across regions and between urban and rural areas. Chapter 2 of the report describes the many facets of deprivation that could either be severe or less severe. In 2006, 18.6 percent of children or 5.4 million children were deprived of at least one of the three dimensions of well-being covered by the study, namely, shelter, sanitation, and water. The report finds some remarkable improvements in the plight of the children based on recent data and indicator estimates. The five pillars of child well-being are examined more closely in Chapter 3. The first section deals with child nutrition and highlights the fact that malnutrition is one of the underlying causes of child mortality. The section on child health, meanwhile, analyzes trends and issues on infant mortality and child immunization. Compared to its close neighbors in Asia, the Philippines posted a drastic decline in immunization rates in 2003. The section on child protection, on the other hand, cites the Philippine government's efforts to protect the rights of families and children which began as early as 1935. Another section is devoted to education and highlights various basic education indicators and trends. It narrates how the 2007 level of elementary participation rate became at par with 1990 level, thus, requiring that the 25-year millennium development target be achieved in eight years. Disparities in education outcomes were also observed in different socioeconomic dimensions. In the section for social protection, policies and programs that aim to prevent, manage, and overcome the risks that confront the poor and vulnerable people were presented. The section also suggests critical areas that should be considered in assessing social safety net programs. In conclusion, the report proposes different strategies for action using the rights-based approach. Some specific recommendations include pursuing an effective population management program; stabilizing macroeconomic fundamentals; building up data and giving due consideration to regional disparities in aid of planning, and policy and program formulation; and allocating more financial and rational manpower resources for health, education, and child protection. As regards other government programs, the report finds that it is not sufficient that budget is allocated adequately. What is crucial is proper targeting and making sure that resources are given to that segment of population where interventions are needed the most. Moreover, research works should continue to look for reasons why gaps persist, to analyze the correlation between interventions and outcomes, and to examine the interrelated forces and relationship that would strengthen the pillars of child well-being. The report ends with a view on how the role and active participation of public institutions, private organizations, communities, and individuals must be upheld and coordinated to promote the welfare of the Filipino children.

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Two yale students named 2024 soros fellows.

Kristine Guillaume and Ananya Agustin Malhotra

Kristine Guillaume, a Ph.D. student in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Ananya Agustin Malhotra, who will pursue her J.D. at Yale Law School are among 30 individuals selected as 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a merit-based program that supports graduate study for immigrants or children of immigrants.

Selected from 2,323 applicants, the 2024 Soros fellows are chosen for their achievements and their potential to make meaningful contributions to the United States across fields of study. They each will receive up to $90,000 in funding to support their graduate studies at institutions across the country.

Since it was founded 26 years ago, the fellowship program has provided more than $80 million in funding, and recipients have studied a range of fields from medicine and the arts to law and business. View the full list of 2024 fellows .

Kristine Guillaume , the daughter of Haitian and Chinese immigrants, was raised in Queens, New York, where her parents instilled in her the values of education and engaging meaningfully with communities near and far. Growing up, she developed a passion for storytelling — particularly the stories of marginalized people in society — that has motivated her paths in the fields of academia and journalism.

She graduated from Harvard College in 2020 with a degree in history and literature and African American Studies. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she pursued independent research on the rise of mass incarceration in the United States through the study of Black prison writing. Her undergraduate honors thesis focused on the prison writings of Angela Davis and George Jackson, which examined how their respective periods of incarceration shaped their visions of Black liberation in the 1970s. At Harvard, she was a reporter for The Harvard Crimson and the paper’s first Black woman president. She has also interned at The Atlantic and CBS Evening News.

Guillaume continued her studies in African American literature and history at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She completed a master’s degree in English and American Studies (2021) and another in intellectual history (2022). Her postgraduate work, together with her undergraduate research, laid the foundation for research she is currently pursuing at Yale, where she is doing a Ph.D. in African American Studies and English.

Her research interests are in 20 th and 21 st century African American literature with a focus on Black prison writing, Black feminist theory, and print culture. Her research is grounded in questions about how prison writing across literary forms and genres might provide insight into how to remake conceptions of freedom, justice, and belonging. In addition, her interests in Black print culture and background as a journalist have informed how her research aims to examine the material constraints around prison writing — namely surveillance, censorship, and access to publishing — especially through a consideration of prison newspapers and periodicals. At Yale, Guillaume is also a research fellow for the Black Bibliography Project and volunteers with the Yale Prison Education Initiative.

Ananya Agustin Malhotra , whose parents came to the U.S. from the Philippines and India, and who was born and raised in a bi-cultural and interfaith household Georgia, says she is deeply motivated by her mother and father’s family histories to advocate for a more just and peaceful future United States foreign policy.

Her interests lie at the intersection of global history, international law, and peace and security issues. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University with a concentration in the School of Public and International Affairs. Her undergraduate thesis, based on oral histories with New Mexican Downwinders, explored the human legacies of the 1945 Trinity Test and the U.S. nuclear age. At Princeton, she served as president of the Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources, and Education (SHARE) Peer Program, where she was first introduced to survivor-centered advocacy.

As a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, Malhotra earned an M.Phil. in modern European history with distinction, studying the histories of empire and anticolonialism in shaping international order. Her dissertation research explored the role of epistemology in the global intellectual history of decolonization and has been published in Global Histories and the Journal of the History of Ideas blog. For the last four years, she has advocated for nuclear disarmament and risk reduction through her research, scholarship, and public commentary.

The 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows join a distinguished community of past recipients, including U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy 03 M.B.A. ’03 M.D., the nation’s first surgeon general of Indian descent, who helped lead the national response to Ebola, Zika, and the coronavirus. It was recently announced that Murthy will be Yale’s 2024 Class Day speaker during Commencement weekend.

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