In line with the Philippine government’s overarching concern on poverty alleviation, the NSCB Executive Board approved the creation of the Technical Committee on Poverty Statistics in its meeting on 13 October 2003 thru Memorandum Order No. 008, Series of 2003. The Committee is tasked to study and recommend improvements on the methodologies and estimation procedures used in generating official poverty statistics and related indicators.

Prior to the creation of the Committee, the Technical Working Group on Income and Poverty Statistics (TWG-IPS), which was then under the Interagency Committee on Labor, Income, and Productivity Statistics, was mandated, thru Executive Order No. 352 on the System of Designated Statistics, to formulate and recommend the poverty estimation methodology, while the NSCB was charged with the task of coming up with the official poverty estimates based on the approved methodology. In the meeting of the NSCB Executive Board on January 15, 2003, it was recommended that the TWG-IPS be elevated to a Technical Committee in view of the importance of poverty statistics and the need to take advantage of the available technical expertise in the field of poverty measurement and estimation.

Presently, the Committee is reviewing the existing official provincial poverty estimation methodology. A series of paper presentations on alternative approaches for the estimation of poverty statistics undertaken under the Asian Development Bank’s Technical Assistance Project 3656, Improving Poverty Monitoring Surveys, and other related independent studies has been scheduled for review and evaluation by the Committee.