While the country has effectively reduced its slum population amid the growing number of rural migrants into its urban areas, poverty and inequality remains high in the Philippines, according to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap).
In its Statistical Yearbook for Asia and the Pacific 2007, Unescap data showed that while the country’s slum population already declined to 44.1 percent in 2001 from 54.9 percent in the 1990s, inequality remains high and even increased.
The report showed that the country’s score in the Gini index, the Gini coefficient multiplied by 100, rose to 44.5 points in 2003, from 43.8 points in 1991. This, the report said is still high considering that an index value of zero corresponds to perfect equality, where everyone earns the same income, and 100 is to perfect inequality, where one person receives all the income.
“Despite decades of solid economic growth leading to significant poverty reduction, income inequality has risen in many Asian and Pacific countries,” Unescap said in its latest report.
“In the past decade or so, inequality rose in 11 out of 20 countries in the region. The increases were steepest in Sri Lanka and Nepal, where the Gini index increased by more than 10 points. The Philippines and Turkey had smaller increases in their Gini indices, but the values are still over 40. Even in Thailand, where the Gini index decreased between 1992 and 2002, the value, at 42, is still high,” the report also said.