SWS: More Filipinos consider selves poor, self-rated poverty highest in 5 years

MANILA, Philippines – At least 54 percent of Filipinos are considering themselves as poor, according to a survey from Social Weather Stations (SWS).

SWS said on Thursday that this self-rated poverty (SRP) ratings, obtained through a survey of 1,200 adults from December 13 to 16, 2019, are the highest recorded results under President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration and since a 54 percent last September 2014.

This translates to 13.1 million families who self-rated themselves as poor — a big jump from the 10.3 million in September 2019.  However, the annual self-poverty rating averages decreased, from 48 percent in 2018 to 45 percent in 2019.

In addition to this, SWS noted that seven percent of the families are considered “newly poor.”

“The December 2019 survey found that of the 54 percent Self-Rated Poor families, 7 percent used to be non-poor 1-4 years ago (Newly Poor), and another 7 percent used to be non-poor five or more years ago (Usually Poor),” SWS said.

“The remaining 40% have never experienced being non-poor (Always Poor),” they added.

Most of the people who rated themselves poor are in the Visayas (67 percent), followed by Mindanao (64 percent), Balance Luzon (47 percent), and Metro Manila (41 percent).

Meanwhile, the self-rated food poor (SRFP) rate also rose by six points, up to 35 percent in December 2019 from just 29 percent in September 2019 — or an estimated 8.6 million in December and 7.1 million in September.

Similarly, the annual SRFP average is also down, from 33 percent in 2018 to 31 percent in 2019.  A lot of the respondents who said that they are food-poor came from Mindanao (50 percent) Visayas (46 percent), Metro Manila (27 percent), and Balance Luzon (25 percent).

The survey results were obtained using face-to-face interviews with respondents, distributed into 300 per each local (Metro Manila, Balance Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao).  SWS maintains sampling error margins of ±3% for national percentages, and ±6% each for Metro Manila, Balance Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.

SWS said they asked respondents to classify their families, both in self-rated poverty and self-rated food poverty, according to choices, namely “hindi mahirap (not poor),”sa linya (on the line), and mahirap (poor).