TACLOBAN CITY-Annual poverty incidence among families in Eastern Visayas in 2015 was estimated at 30.7 percent based on official poverty statistics released by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
This implies that around 3 in every 10 families in Eastern Visayas are poor.
During the same period in 2012, poverty incidence among families in the region was estimated at 37.4 percent.
A significant reduction by 6.7 percentage points was observed between 2012 and 2015.
Among the provinces in the region, Biliran registered the lowest poverty incidence among families at 17.4 percent.
Leyte ranked second lowest at 23.6 percent, followed by Southern Leyte, Eastern Samar and Samar with 30.2, 37.4 and 39.5 percent, respectively.
Meanwhile, Northern Samar remained to record the highest poverty incidence at 47.9 percent.
Improvements in poverty incidence between 2012 and 2015 were observed in all provinces in the region except Northern Samar, the only province that registered an increase by 4.4 percentage points from 43.5 percent in 2012 to 47.9 percent in 2015.
Eastern Samar recorded the biggest significant decrease by 18.0 percentage points from 55.4 percent in 2012 to 37.4 percent in 2015.
All provinces in the country were clustered from 1 to 5 using confidence intervals of poverty incidence as the clustering variable, where Cluster 1 comprises the bottom poor provinces and Cluster 5 comprises the least poor provinces.
In 2015, Northern Samar and Samar were included in cluster 1; Eastern Samar and Southern Leyte belonged in cluster 2, while Leyte and Biliran were in cluster 3.
During 2009, 2012, and 2015, the province of Northern Samar was consistently included in the cluster of poor provinces.
The annual per capita poverty threshold in the region, or the minimum income required to meet the basic food and non-food needs of every person, was estimated at P21,304.
This indicates an increase of about 17.9 percent from the P18,076 annual per capita poverty threshold in 2012.
This implies that a family of five in Eastern Visayas must have at least P8,877 on the average every month to meet both basic food and non-food needs. (PR)
