WHO SPEND THEIR MONEY WISELY – MEN OR WOMEN?
by Dr. Romulo A. Virola ¹
Secretary General, NSCB

Thanks to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the Philippine Social Science Council, this writer was able to participate in the 55th Session of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) held in Sydney last 5-12 April. I was a discussant in two sessions: New Directions in the Dissemination of Official Statistics organized and chaired by Dr. Siu-Ming Tam of the ABS and Surveys of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, organized and chaired by Dr. Dalisay S. Maligalig of the Asian Development Bank. I also presented a paper co-authored with Candido J. Astrologo, entitled Income and Expenditure Patterns of Female-Headed Households in the Philippines²

Researchers in the Philippines are very lucky indeed, that the National Statistics Office (NSO) generates Public-Use Files (PUFs) for its Family Income and Expenditures Survey (FIES). PUFs are anonymized micro data sets that allow researchers to mine the load of information captured in the FIES while preserving the confidentiality of the information collected. Too bad the NSO has decided to charge researchers for these PUFs. The PUFs do not come very timely either!

The NSO conducts the FIES every three years to gather statistics on family income and expenditures that generate weights needed in the computation of the Consumer Price Index and allow the NSCB to generate official poverty statistics. In the paper I presented in the ISI, we looked at the characteristics of female-headed households (FHHs) and the male-headed households (MHHs) captured by the 1994, 1997 and 2000 FIES.³ Let me now cite some of the interesting things we saw, many of which should not be new but should remind us how and who we are:

1. In Philippine society, men are generally regarded as the head of the family but the proportion of FHHs has risen from about 15% in 1994 to 17.5% in 2000. I guess we do not refer to this as the feminization of the household head?
2. Heads of FHHs are older by 8 to 9 years: 56 years old for FHHs versus 47 years old for MHHs in 2000. This is partly explained by the fact that many of them are widows. For the same reason, FHHs are smaller in family size than MHHs by one member
3. It might make our friends from the Population Commission feel better that the proportion of families with size less than five has gone up since 1994: from 27% to 38% for MHHs and from 45% to 62% for FHHs.
4. Almost 60 out of every 100 FHHs reside in urban areas. To say that this means that men die faster in urban centers is of course, erroneous interpretation/misuse of statistics!
5. And bad news for Secretary Abad! The human capital of our country has depreciated! While most household heads used to be elementary school graduates, the 2000 FIES showed that most of them did not even finish elementary school! In fact, for heads of FHHs, most of them used to be graduates of high school; in 2000, most of them only finished elementary school! Indeed, seriously, this should alarm all of us and we call loud on the leaders of the education sector to do something about this, and fast! By all means, let us raise and develop knowledge-oriented Filipinos who can compete against the best of the rest of the world!
6. Members of FHHs had consistently higher employment rates, by at least two percentage points. I hope this is not a case of under kay nanay, masisipag; under kay tatay, mas tamad!
7. And would you believe this? Average family income of FHHs was also consistently higher, by at least P1000 per month!
8. But while there may be many FHHs that are relatively better off, there are also many FHHs that are much worse off. In 2000, the income of the richest 30% of the FHHs was more than 11 times the income of the poorest 30%; among MHHs, it was only 8 times. This may be what some refer to as the feminization of poverty!
9. About 5% of family income of MHHs comes from abroad; for FHHs, it is about 20%. In this connection, data from the POEA show that newly-hired female OFWs outnumbered their male counterparts two to one from 2000 to 2002. And among service workers, females outnumbered males close to ten to one!
10. Now for the spending habits (please refer to the table)
    1. As maybe expected, MHHs spend relatively more on alcoholic beverages and tobacco than FHHs. But FHHs spend more on personal care!
    2. MHHs spend relatively more on food, by about 5 percentage points. No wonder then that maraming tatay ang malalaki ang tiyan?
    3. And quite revealing is the fact that FHHs spend relatively more on education and medical services! Truly, mothers know best! Not only that, their savings rate is higher by about 4 percentage points! And if male-headed households could abstain from alcoholic beverages and tobacco, they would have 50% more to spend on the education of their children! Talking about policy uses of statistics, up with those sin taxes then, wouldn’t you agree?

And so, who spends wisely? And while we are at this, a friend of the Philippines, Lorraine Corner, former Regional Economic Advisor of UNIFEM Asia-Pacific & Arab States, challenges our NSO to gender sensitize the next Census of Population and the next Census of Philippine Business and Industry. She emails: it would be great to see the Philippines in the lead again ! Yes, Lorraine!

Reactions and views are welcome thru email to the author at ra.virola@nscb.gov.ph

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¹ Secretary General of the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) and Chairman of the Statistical Research and Training Center (SRTC). He holds a Ph. D. in Statistics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA and has taught mathematics and statistics at the University of the Philippines. He is also a past president of the Philippine Statistical Association.
² The households referred to in the paper are really families.
³ The sampling design of the FIES was changed in 1997 and again in 2003. In 1994, the sample size of the FIES was 26,000 households; in 1997 this became 41,000 households and in the latest FIES for 2003, the sample size was 51,000 households. The PUF for the 2003 FIES has not been disseminated by the NSO.

Posted 09 May 2005.