Poverty Status Differentiation of the Families in Negros Oriental Based on Selected Socioeconomic Variables

POVERTY STATUS DIFFERENTIATION OF THE FAMILIES IN

NEGROS ORIENTAL BASED ON SELECTED

SOCIOECONOMIC VARIABLES

By: Julhusin B. Jalisan

ABSTRACT

Two out of five Filipinos live in poverty. The Philippine Daily Inquirer (7 January 2002) reported that the Philippines still has the highest poverty incidence in Southeast Asia. Although almost all of the regions have a declining poverty incidence, there are two regions that have rising poverty incidence. These are Eastern and Central Visayas where Negros Oriental belongs.

The continuing persistence of poverty necessitates the need to do a continuing conduct of research to go beyond broad poverty lines and cutoffs and into research which will identify poverty groups by their characteristics, conditions, locations and causes. The researcher believes that for different categories of the poor in different places, there are different causes and conditions, which must be known specifically before appropriate policies and methods of implementation are decided.

This study focuses on the differentiation of the poor families from the non-poor families in Negros Oriental based on the result of the Family Income and Expenditure Survey conducted in the year 2003. In addition, the researcher also referred to the result of the Labor Force Survey (LFS) of 2003.

Appurtenant to the statistical calculations of data, the researcher utilized the MegaStat, an add-in feature of Excel (MicroSoft Corporation 2002) and the MicroStat (EcoSoft, Inc. 1987).

On the basis of the findings of the study, the six socioeconomic variables utilized in the various analyses are good predictors of poverty especially if the comparison involves only the poor and non-poor families. Age and years of schooling of the household head are directly related with poverty status, that is, as age and level of education increase, family income also increases. On the other hand, the family size and percentage of income derived from agriculture are inversely related with poverty status. Ditto with the percentage of income spent on food. The mean number of earners for each group is almost the same.