Little is known about the changes in the level and incidence of poverty in the Philippines during the GEC. Even less is known about the dynamics of poverty across population groups and social divides. Such understanding has been largely constrained by the absence of nationally representative, comparable household surveys on incomes and expenditures covering the pre-crisis and crisis periods. The latest data available for poverty comparison are from the 2006 Family Income and Expenditures Survey (FIES) of the National Statistics Office.8 While the 2009 FIES has been conducted, the public-use file that will prove useful for poverty comparison is not yet available.
Ideally, in understanding the dynamics of poverty during a crisis, one has to have a household panel data, i.e., the same households interviewed repeatedly over time. Such data set will be even more useful in informing policy choices if it is also nationally representative. The effort to construct such a household panel data set and use it to examine the impact of the crisis across social divides is described below. As the effort yielded only panel data covering 2006, 2007, and 2008, results in section 4 were used to ―augment‖ the data to ―approximate‖ household welfare levels for 2009.