Growth, Poverty, and Food Policy in the Philippines: Lessons for the Post-COVID-19 Era

The Philippine economy’s growth has accelerated since 2010, outperforming its Asian peers in the current decade. However, poverty reduction is comparatively weak in response to growth, suggesting that growth has been less inclusive than expected. Poverty in the Philippines is still largely a rural phenomenon despite the country’s rapid urbanization. Our primary objective is to reexamine how much the national food policy has influenced the poverty-reducing effects of economic growth using the more recent national household-level data from 2000 to 2021. The longer-term data, including a period of mobility relaxation following long lockdowns upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, allow us to revisit the growth-poverty conundrum in the Philippines. We focus on the more recent decade of relatively sustained growth compared to earlier studies on the subject. We use Engel food shares as a proxy for household welfare and consider the differential welfare effects of food price changes across segments of the population. We show that economic growth in recent years would have been strongly pro-poor if not for the misguided set of policy tools chosen to achieve the food self-sufficiency goal. The government’s move to dismantle the quantitative restriction regime on rice imports in favor of tariffs is a step in the right direction.