SELF-RATED POVERTY IN THE PHILIPPINES, 1981-1992

The definition of poverty in terms of adequacy of income or expenditur es is not conducive to analysis of time-trends in poverty, because it is too expensive to survey income or expenditures frequently. On the o ther hand, the poverty-self-rating approach is an economical means of generating a time-series. The bottom-up perspective on poverty is soci ally meaningful in itself, irrespective of its correlation with povert y measured from the top down. Unlike official poverty lines, poverty t hresholds obtained by the self-rating approach are not institutionally manipulable. Cross-sectionally, the Philippine data on self-rated pov erty and self-rated poverty lines have familiar economic-demographic c haracteristics. Use of the self-rating approach in the Philippines sin ce 1981, enabling poverty to be surveyed very many times, shows that p overty has been quite volatile. In contrast, the official series on po verty has only three data points (1985, 1988, and 1991) within that pe riod. Regression analysis attributes the volatility in self-rated pove rty during 1981-92 mainly to changes in the inflation rate, and second ly to changes in the unemployment rate. Changes in per capita income, however, were not significant in explaining changes in the level of po verty.