The poverty incidence in the city and province of Iloilo has increased during the first semester of 2021 as compared to the same period three years ago, results of the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) survey showed.

The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) survey, in a special release on poverty statistics, showed that the poverty incidence or the proportion of families living below the poverty threshold or the minimum income required to meet their basic food and non-food requirements is up by 20.3 percent in Iloilo province.

“This equates to 102,900 families with an income less than the poverty threshold. It has increased by 17.6 percent in three years since 2018,” said Jerry Dulotan, supervising statistical specialist and officer-in-charge of the Iloilo Provincial Statistical Office.

For the same period last year, the poverty incidence in Iloilo City also rose to 8.4 percent when compared with 4.4 percent in the first six months of 2018.

The increase is equivalent to almost 8,500 families having income below the minimum amount to meet the basic requirements.

The PSA report showed that for the first semester of last year, a family of five living in the province on average needs to have PHP14,056 per month to meet their basic food and non-food requirements, an increase of 11.62 percent when compared with PHP12,593 in the same period in 2018.

In Iloilo City, a family of five needs PHP14,846 per month, or 13.85 percent higher than the average amount of PHP13,040 in the first semester of 2018.

Dulotan, in a follow-up interview, said that FIES is conducted every three years, the last was in 2018.

The first visit for last year was done in July, with January to June as the reference period. The second visit is ongoing this month to capture their income and expenditures from July to December.

“Our sample households during our first visit in July are the same households that are being interviewed for the second round so we could capture their spending pattern and income for the whole year,” he said.

The samples were picked randomly from a frame that contains the 2015 result of the Census of Population and Housing consisting of 1,545 households from Iloilo province and 1,682 from the city.

The second round that commenced on January 10 will end on January 31.

Dulotan said the survey is timely because the result would reflect the impact of the health pandemic on the income and expenditures of families.

They target to release the final result of the 2021 FIES in the third quarter of 2022.

The FIES provides a basic source of information for the estimation of the household account in the System of National Accounts and balances, measurement of the Human and Development Index, measurement of poverty, and measurement of the living conditions of different sections of the population and disparities in levels of living across geographical regions.

The gathered data will provide benchmark information to update the weights used in the estimation of the Consumer Price Index, and to provide inputs in the estimation of the country’s poverty threshold and incidence, he added.PNA