This is shown by a new analysis from the World Bank. In a so-called Macro Poverty Outlook, future developments in the economy and poverty are predicted, and here the World Bank comes with good news: Poverty in the Philippines looks set to fall to a single-digit percentage in 2026. Henrik Søborg is associate professor emeritus in international development studies at Roskilde University and researches, among other things, the political and economic development in South Asia. He helps to put developments in the country into perspective, when Verdens Beste Nyheder calls him. – The Philippines is surrounded by economies that have been successful and experienced less and less poverty, he says. After all, there are no other regions of the developing world where there has been similar economic growth as in Asia. In that way, it is a success story. Several forms of poverty There are several different poverty lines. One of them is the international poverty line, which is also called extreme poverty. If you live in extreme poverty, you live on less than $2.15 a day. The first of the 17 sustainability goals, which all countries agreed on in 2015, is that extreme poverty must be abolished completely by 2030. Extreme poverty is relatively low in the Philippines. The figures from 2021 show that this applies to three per cent of the population. But there are also other, higher levels of poverty, where people live on less than $3.65 or $6.85 a day. It is the middle poverty line, i.e. the one where you live on less than 3.65 dollars – which is equivalent to approximately 40 Norwegian kroner – which the World Bank predicts will fall to 9.3 percent in 2026 in the Philippines. According to the local financial media Business Mirror, it will even be two years ahead of the government’s own targets. Today, poverty in the Philippines is 13.7 percent. When the goal of falling below 10 percent is reached, according to the country’s own authorities, it will mean that 14 million Filipinos will be lifted out of poverty. Surrounded by tigers Henrik Søborg points out that several of the Philippines’ neighboring countries are so-called “tiger economies”, i.e. countries with economic growth, which have made great strides forward. This concerns, among other things, Singapore and Taiwan. – It is not a region that is characterized by severe poverty to that extent, quite the opposite. It is a region that has been characterized by the Asian growth economies, which have been successful economies in many ways, he says. It is not only poverty that falls in the Philippines, so does inequality. The so-called Gini coefficient measures how much inequality there is in a society – if the number is up to 100, there is high inequality, while closer to 0 means low inequality. The latest figures from 2021 show that the Gini coefficient for the Philippines is 40.7. Inequality is still relatively high, but it has fallen. At the turn of the millennium, it stood at 47.7.
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