Abstract
The Philippines is home to about four million Filipino families who live below the poverty line, and to about 17 million families who live above it. Nearly, half of all poor families do not meet their food needs. Despite the Philippines’ fast economic growth in recent years, the growth has not translated into significant social impact as the country’s poverty situation has remained virtually unchanged. While there are the so-called highly urbanized areas in the Philippines that drive this growth, creating massive employment and lifting the quality of lives of many families, many parts of the country have lagged behind, barely generating jobs that could provide enough income for the workers and their families. This chapter attempts to better understand the constraints that the poor families face to get themselves out of poverty by looking more closely at three of the provinces in the Philippines that have unique spatial characteristics.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
—Leo Tolstoy
Ronald U. Mendoza is dean of Ateneo School of Government (ASoG); Rosechin Olfindo is nonresident research fellow at ASoG; and Camille Regina Maala is research associate at Asian Institute of Management (AIM). This paper draws extensively from the “Towards Zero Poverty Project” undertaken by AIM Rizalino S. Navarro Policy Center for Competitiveness with support from United Nations Development Programme and the National Economic and Development Authority. For correspondence, please contact the authors at: ronmendoza@post.harvard.edu, rosechin@post.harvard.edu, and cmaala@aim.edu.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
First class cities or municipalities have average annual income of 400 million pesos or more.
- 3.
It was pointed that splitting of regions (i.e., Region IV into Region IV-A and Region IV-B), creating new provinces or regions (i.e., Region XVIII or Negros Island Region, which formerly consisted of Negros Oriental and Negros Occidental), and legislating more congressional districts, hinder sustainable growth by further enlarging government budgets, expanding bureaucracy, and fragmenting of markets (Alburo 2015).
- 4.
Of the 173 armed encounters between the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and revolutionary groups such as the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) that occurred in Mindanao over the period of 1987–2004, 38.73 % (67 encounters) occurred in Maguindanao alone.
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The under-generation of Maguindanao electric power grid may be due to mismanagement of the local power industry. In November 2014, the National Electrification Administration (NEA) took over Maguindanao Electric Cooperative, Inc. due to the latter’s accumulated debt of more than 800 million pesos.
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For example, by allowing the public access to information on tax and other payments, and how the natural resource wealth is managed public dissemination of mining revenues and receipts was done through the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), whereby both national and local governments as well as mining companies are held accountable.
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Mendoza, R.U., Olfindo, R., Maala, C.R. (2017). Spatial Disparities and Poverty: The Case of Three Provinces in the Philippines. In: Batabyal, A., Nijkamp, P. (eds) Regional Growth and Sustainable Development in Asia. New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27589-5_2
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