About 43 percent, or 10.7 million Filipino families, consider themselves poor, according to a survey done in December 2021 by pollster Social Weather Stations (SWS).
The survey results released this week also reported that 39 percent of respondents considered themselves borderline poor.
The number of those who said they were poor decreased by five percent from 2020 figures while those who were borderline poor increased by three percent.
Self-rated poor families were highest in the central Philippines at 59 percent, followed by Mindanao at 43 percent, Balance Luzon at 41 percent, and the National Capital Region at 25 percent.
The capital region posted the highest decline among families who considered themselves poor by 20 percent, while Mindanao declined by 11 percent, and Balance Luzon and the Visayas recorded a one percent decrease.
The survey also showed that 6.9 percent of those who rated themselves poor were “newly poor” while 4.2 percent were “usually poor.”
Of the 10.7 million self-rated poor families, SWS estimated that 1.7 million were newly poor, 1.1 million were usually poor, and 7.8 million were always poor.
The self-rated poverty threshold nationwide remained at 12,000 pesos with a median self-rated poverty gap at 5,000 pesos compared to the previous year.
The self-rated poverty threshold is the minimum monthly budget self-rated poor families say they need for home expenses, while the self-rated poverty threshold gap is how much poor families lack in their minimum monthly budgets relative to their self-rated poor threshold.
Up to 31 percent of families rated themselves as food poor, 44 percent were borderline food-poor, and 24 percent not food-poor.
The pollster estimated the number of self-rated food-poor families at 7.9 million.
The survey was done from December 12 to 16, 2021 with a ±2.6 percent sampling error margin for national percentages and ±5.2 percent for subnational percentages of NCR, Balance Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao.
