The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) releases today the 2018 Municipal and City Level Poverty Estimates. This is a follow-up study to their earlier projects¹ by the PSA (including those with the former National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB)), which resulted to the release of 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009,  2012, and 2015 poverty estimates for municipalities and cities using the small area estimation (SAE) technique developed by World Bank called the Elbers, Lanjouw, and Lanjouw (ELL) methodology.

The SAE methodology employed in the generation of the 2018 municipal and city level poverty estimates combined the 2015 Census of Population (PopCen), and the merged 2018 Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) and January 2019 round of the Labor Force Survey (LFS) to produce reliable poverty estimates at lower levels of geographic disaggregation. For this set of estimates, other data sources were explored and utilizes such as the 2018 Updating of the List of Establishments (ULE) of PSA and the 2018 Nighttime Lights Data of the Earth Observatory Group (EOG) of the Colorado School of Mines.

The 2018 SAE of Poverty produces estimates² for the 14 sub-municipalities of the City of Manila, 110 cities and 1,487 municipalities with corresponding standards errors, coefficients of variation, and confidence intervals.

DENNIS S. MAPA, Ph.D.
Undersecretary
National Statistician and Civil Registrar General
 

1 Earlier studies were made possible through funding assistance from the World Bank (WB), the Australian Government through the Australia-WB Philippines Development Trust Fund and the Government of the Philippines.
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/node/162559