WASHINGTON -- At least 14.8 million Filipinos try to survive on less than $1 a day, accounting for 1.5 percent of the people in the world currently trapped in extreme poverty, according to latest World Bank estimates.
But some 43 million in the Philippines, based on the country’s population in 2000, live on $2 a day, the less extreme international measure of poverty.
Data from the World Development Indicators (WDI) 2007 showed that global poverty rates continued to fall in the first four years of the 21st century, with the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day falling below the 1 billion mark.
Two-dollar-a-day poverty rates were falling too, but an estimated 2.6 billion people, almost half the population of the developing world, were still living below that level in 2004.
The WDI Indicators 2007, a publication, was launched here on Sunday on the sidelines of the joint International Monetary Fund-World Bank spring meetings.
People living on less than $1 a day fell to 18.4 percent as a share of the total population in 2004, leaving an estimated 985 million people living in extreme poverty.
By comparison, the total number of the world’s extremely poor was 1.25 billion in 1990.
Between 1990 and 2004, dollar-a-day poverty fell by more than 260 million, according to the World Bank.
Filipinos living on the $1-a-day international poverty line accounted for 19 percent of the Philippine population of 76.5 million as of May 2000. (The country’s population today is about 88 million.)
Poverty measures, based on an international poverty line, attempt to hold the real value of poverty constant across countries, as done when making comparisons over time.
The commonly used $1-a-day standard, measured in 1985 international prices and adjusted to local currency, is typical of the poverty lines in low-income countries.
Growth, China factor cut poverty
The World Development Indicators 2007 pointed out that an average 3.9-percent annual growth in per capita gross domestic product since 2000 among developing countries helped cut poverty rates.
Another key reason for the decline in dollar-a-day poverty was China’s massive poverty reduction between 1990 and 2004 that trimmed East Asia’s extreme poverty rate to 9 percent in 2004.
In the rest of the developing world, good economic performance and a lower poverty incidence offset a rise in the sheer number of poor people.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, 298 million people were living in extreme poverty in 2004, practically the same as that in 1999. But the number of poor people had increased continuously in the previous two decades.
Inequality worsened despite growth
The report found that, in the past decade, economic growth did not automatically lead to poverty reduction.
In some countries and regions, inequality worsened because poor people did not reap the fruits of economic expansion. A lack of job opportunities, limited education or poor health aggravated the situation.
“Growth is essential to reducing poverty, but it isn’t the only factor. The WDI [goes] beyond growth and poverty rates to ask how income is distributed, whether health care and education are improving, and to assess the business environment. These factors all affect the quality of people’s lives,” said Francois Bourguignon, World Bank chief economist and senior vice president for development economics.
The WDI estimated that the share of the poorest quintile in the Philippine national consumption or income was only 5.4 percent.
A quintile refers to any of five equal groups into which a population can be divided according to the distribution of values of a particular variable like poverty.
Other indicators for RP
Other development indicators for the Philippines were:
Malnutrition under age 5 averaged about 28 percent from 2000 to 2005, only modestly slowing from 30 percent in 1990-1995.
Elementary school completion rate increased to 97 percent as of 2005 from 86 percent in 1991.
Ratio of female to male enrollments in elementary and high school was 106 in 2005 compared with 104 in 1991.
Mortality rate of children below age 5 per 1,000 births fell to 33 in 2005 from 63 in 1990.
Detailed picture
Through data, WDI 2007 provides a detailed picture of the world.
It includes, for example, information on health expenditures, on transport and other infrastructure services, on the quality of public sector management, on Internet access, on access to improved water sources, and on carbon dioxide emissions.
The World Bank has used performance assessments of governments as a basis for allocating funds on easy terms since the mid-1970s.
In the annual Country Policy and Institutional Assessment, or CPIA, bank staff evaluated country policies and institutions covering four main clusters -- economic management, structural policies, policies for social inclusion and equity, and public sector management and institutions.
WDI 2007 listed the most recent CPIA data for the 76 countries eligible to receive grants or credits from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank’s funding arm for the poorest countries.
CPIA indicators measure the extent to which a country’s policy and institutional framework supports sustainable growth and poverty reduction and, consequently, the effective use of development assistance.
The 11th edition of the WDI looked at countries that have done unusually well over the past decade. It found strong performers in all regions, with notably fast growth in GDP per capita among many states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Worrying
But it also found that the countries with the highest rates of under-5 mortality a decade ago had, on average, made the slowest reduction in mortality.
“These results are worrying,” said Alan Gelb, World Bank director of development policy. “The fact that under-5 mortality is 15 times higher in low income countries than in wealthy ones is a stark example of how far we still need to go,” he said.
The World Bank acknowledged that international comparisons of poverty estimates entail both conceptual and practical problems as countries have different definitions of poverty.
Local poverty lines tend to have higher purchasing power in rich countries, where more generous standards were used, than in poor countries.
Citing national benchmarks in the Philippines as of survey year 1997, for instance, the World Bank report said the percentage of the population below the poverty line was 36.8 percent.
Rural areas had a higher poverty rate of 50.7 percent compared with 21.5 percent in urban areas.
