The Population of the Philippines

Introduction

The population of the Philippines is still one of the faster growing ones in Southeast Asia. Between 1980 and 1990, its average annual growth rate stood at about 2.3 percent. For 1995, the Population Reference Bureau pegs the Philippine rate of natural increase at 2.1 percent, compared to 1.6 for Indonesia, 1.4 for Thailand, and 1.2 for Singapore.1 One of the main reasons for the relatively high population growth rate is not the absence of fertility decline-during the decade of the 80s, total fertility declined by about 12 percent-but the concomitant mortality decline: between 1980 and 1990, overall mortality levels declined likewise by 12 percent.

In terms of socioeconomic development, the Philippines had a good head start after WW II. Around 1960, the country was among the most advanced in the Southeast Asian region. This advantage has long since disappeared. Today, the Philippines is trying hard to catch up with its neighbors in the region. The current (1993) Philippine GNP per capita is estimated to be close to US $ 850, an almost embarrassing figure when compared to corresponding figures such as those for Malaysia ($ 3,160) and Thailand ($ 2.040).2

Economic measures like GNP hide the great poverty divide that still plagues the Philippines. According to Department of Labor statistics, average annual household income in 1991 was Pesos 65,000 (ca. US $ 2,600), or approximately Pesos 13,000 per capita. At the same time, the annual per capita poverty threshold was set at Pesos 7,212. Despite this low threshold, close to 40 percent of all households in 1991 were living below the poverty line.3 What this means in reality is reflected in the following socioeconomic profile.

Most information presented here is based on the 1990 Census of Population and Housing and the 1990 Barangay Census.4 This particular data source was chosen for this pro filing exercise because Philippine censuses collect a great deal of socioeconomic information which, in equal detail for all of the country's administrative subdivisions, is not available elsewhere.

1 Population Reference Bureau, Inc. Washington, D.C., 1995
2 Ibid.
3 Department of Labor and Employment, Bureau of Labor and Employment Statistics. Current Labor Statistics. Manila, September 1995.
4 Part of the information collated in this report was collected in the course of a project performed by OPS under contract with The Philippine Institute for Development Studies between 1992 and 1994. The indirect support provided by PIDS for this report is gratefully acknowledged.

I. GENERAL INFORMATION

1. PHYSIOGRAPHY 1

The Philippine Archipelago, a chain of around 7,100 islands, is situated some 1,000 kilometers east off the coast of Southeast Asia in the warm and shallow waters between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The islands, with a discontinuous coastline totaling close to 35,000 kilometers, are spread over the area between latitudes 4- 23' N and 21- 25' N and longitudes 116 E and 127 E. In the west, the archipelago is bounded by the South China Sea, the Pacific Ocean in the east, the Sulu and Celebes Seas in the south, and the Bashi Channel, separating it from Taiwan, in the north. The greatest length of the archipelago north to south is 1,851 kilometers, and its greatest breadth east to west 1,107 kilometers.

The total land area of the Philippines covers 300,000 square kilometers, 92.3 percent of which are contained within the 11 largest islands of the archipelago.

Table 1. PRINCIPAL ISLANDS OF THE PHILIPPINES AND THEIR LAND AREAS

The topography of the Philippines is varied; it includes lowland plains, high mountain ranges, and high-elevation plateaus. The largest mountain ranges, located almost parallel to each other in the northern part of Luzon, are the Sierra Madre and the Cordillera. The highest mountain in the country, with a peak elevation of close to 3,000 meters, is Mount Apo in Southern Mindanao.

There are about 106 volcanos spread all over the country, 19 of which are considered active. The most active among them at this time is Mount Pinatubo in Central Luzon, whose continuous eruptions have devastated and continue to devastate the rice bowl of the nation.

Other active volcanos that have erupted repeatedly in recent decades are Mount Mayon in Bicol and Mount Taal in Cavite Province, the latter situated some 50 kilometers from the scenter of Metro Manila.

2. ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE

Geographically, the Philippine archipelago is composed of three major island groupings: Luzon in the north (47 percent of the country's land area), Mindanao in the south (34 percent of the total land area), and the Visayas sandwiched between the two, covering the remaining 19 percent of the land area. Administratively, the country is divided into provinces, of which there were 73 at the time of the 1990 Census. Provinces are subdivided into cities (60 in 1990) and municipalities (1,532), and the latter into barrios or barangays (40,904). For development purposes, provinces were combined into regions in the early 1970s. These regions have undergone repeated redefinitions. In 1990, 15 regions were distinguished, including the National Capital Region (the City of Manila plus 1 6 other contiguous cities and municipalities) and two "autonomous" regions, one located in the northern part of Luzon (Cordillera Autonomous Region) and the other in Mindanao (Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao). The division of the country into regions and provinces as of 1990 is illustrated in Fig.1 (see page 3).

Table 2. LAND AREA, BY REGION: PHILIPPINES

From the time of the Spaniards, the Philip. pines have had an extremely centralized political and administrative structure. The Local Government Code, enacted in the early 1990s, broke with that tradition and transferred, through a process of 'devolution', larger powers of decision-making to local governments in provinces, municipalities and, in some limited way, also baran. gays. The latter serve as "primary planning and implementing unit of government pro. grams, projects and activities and as a forum in which the collective views of the people in the community can be crystallized." In the course of this 'devolution' of powers, the importance of regions was de-emphasized in favor of provinces, and the roles of many regional executives were either re.defined or their positions abolished.

Since 1990, the Western, Northern, Southern and Central Mindanao regions have been realigned once again and a new province was created and added to Region XII (Central Mindanao): Sarangani.

Fig.1

1 SOURCE: National Statistics Office. Philippine Yearbook 1989. Manila, 1989.

II. DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

1. POPULATION SIZE AND GROWTH

During the 20th century, the Philippine population doubled its size three times: from 8 million at the beginning of the century to 16 million at the time World War II started; from 16 to 32 million between World War II and the mid-1960s, and to approximately 65 million shortly before the end of the century (Fig.2). During the first of these doubling periods, which extended over almost 40 years, the average annual growth rate hovered around 2 percent. The second doubling, during which the average annual growth rate stood at 3 percent, was achieved in just half the time required for the first. Since the 1970s, population growth has been on a rather slow but steady decline (Fig-3). About all population growth during this century has been the result of natural increase; international migration was and is insignificant.

Fig.4 shows the estimated past and future course of the Demographic Transition in the country, i.e. the change from high birth and death rates to lower ones. The figure suggests that, during the 1960s and 70s, the country's birth rate did not fail to decline as has often been claimed but that it declined approximately at the same pace as the death rate, thereby leaving the rate of population growth almost unchanged. It was only around 1980 that the decline of the crude birth rate began to accelerate.

Fig. 2. POPULATION GROWTH IN THE 2Oth CENTURY
BY MAJOR GEOGRAPHI REGION, PHILIPPINE8

Fig. 3. POPULATION GROWTH, BY INTERCENSAL PERIOD
PHLIPPNES. 1903-1990

Fig. 4. THE DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION: PHILIPPINES
BASED ON U.N. ESTIMATES AND PROJECTIONS

Population growth in the country did not proceed uniformly but varied from one area to the next. During much of the twentieth century, the Visayas Regions have supplied people first for Mindanao, and later for Metro Manila and Mindanao. In consequence, the Visayas have long been a low growth (or outmigration) area, in contrast to Mindanao and, somewhat later, Manila and surrounding provinces, which have been high growth (inmigration) regions (see Fig. 5). Historically, Mindanao has been the least populated region of the Philippines, promising open lands to willing settlers. By 1990, this situation had changed. Population growth centers in Mindanao such as Misamis Oriental, Davao del Sur, Zamboanga del Sur and Lanao del Norte had reached population densities comparable to those that had existed in the more crowded provinces of Luzon only 20 years earlier, and at the time of the 1990 Census, the population of Mindanao outnumbered that of the Visayas by 1.3 million.

Fig.5. POPULATION GROWTH BETWEEN 1903 AND 1990:
PHILIPPINES AND REGIONS

Population growth differentials in the country during the decade of the 80s were substantial, as Table 3 documents. 1980-90 intercensal growth rates of the 15 administrative regions of the country varied from a high of 36 percent in ARMM to a low of 9 percent in the Eastern Visayas. Provincial variations of intercensal growth rates were even larger, ranging from 76 percent in Rizal Province to just a little more than one percent in Northern Samar.

Table 3. POPULATION SIZE 1980 AND 1990 AND 1980-90 POPULATION GROWTH. BY SEX AID REGION: PHILIPPINES

Fig. 6 illustrates that, during the 1980s, the country had maintained its two traditional population growth centers: industrialized and densely populated Metro Manila and neighboring provinces, and those provinces in Mindanao with relatively undepleted land resources indicated by low population density.

Fig. 6

2. POPULATION DENSITY

In 1990, the national territory of the Philippines of approximately 300,000 square kilometers contained 60.5 million people. Had these people been equally distributed over the land area, each square kilometer would have held 202 persons, a relatively small figure by world standards. But people do not distribute themselves equally over any given area but tend to concentrate where livelihood opportunities are best. Since the latter do not remain constant but change because old resources become depleted and new ones are opened up, people constantly adjust by redistributing themselves, a process known as internal migration.

Table 4. LAND AREA. BY REGION:PHILIPPINES

Table 4 shows differences in population density by region at the time of the 1990 Census. A large number of people was concentrated on the 636 square kilometers of the National Capital Region, resulting in an average density of 12,314 persons per square kilometer in that area. By contrast, in the northern Luzon regions of the Cordillera and Cagayan Valley, average density was far below 100. When Metro Manila is excluded, the average density on the island of Luzon is, at the present time, almost identical to that in the Visayas despite the fact that the Visayas have for a long time provided the bulk of migrants to Mindanao as well as a large share of the migrants to Metro Manila.

The Philippines contain two major population concentrations, the nucleus of which are the country's two largest cities, Manila and Cebu: Metropolitan Manila, and Metropolitan Cebu. The first of these metropolitan areas had a population density of 12,500 persons per km2 in 1990, and the latter a density of only 1,800 persons per km2. Metro Manila is surrounded by such--in the Philippine context-high-density provinces as Cavite (896 persons/km2), Laguna (870), Pampanga (701), Bulacan (537), and Rizal (532). Around Metro Cebu, located on a relatively small island with the same name, no such concentration can take place.

3. URBAN POPULATION

The Philippine Census of 1970 classified 31.8 percent of the country's population as 'urban'. At the time of the 1980 Census, urban Filipinos accounted for 37.3 percent of the total population, and another ten years later, almost one half of all Filipinos were living in areas classified as urban. These figures imply that the pace of urbanization in the country during the 1980s was twice that of the preceding decade. No changes in the definition of 'urban' were made between the censuses of 1970 and 1990, a definition based on criteria such as population size and density, physical infrastructure and administrative functions of barangays.2

If urban-rural population figures reported bythe censuses of 1980 and 1990 are taken at face value, they imply that 92 percent of all 1980-90 intercensal population growth was produced by the urban population and that the rural population had stagnated or, in some areas, declined.

	1980 CENSUS		1990 CENSUS		1980 - 1990 POPULATION GROWTH
	Number	%	Number	%	TOTAL	ANNUAL
Total Population	48,098,460	100	60,559,419	100	25.9	2.3
Urban Population	17,943,897	37	29,439,930	49	64.1	5.0
Rural Population	30,154,563	63	31,119,489	51	3.2	0.3

While such a situation is not impossible, it is rather unlikely because fertility in rural areas has continued at levels substantially higher than in urban places, and rural-urban migration of the magnitude needed to bring about an increase in the urban population from 18 to 30 million in a time span of ten years would have involved almost every fifth Filipino.

To measure the intercensal growth of the country's urban population, three different growth sources have to be considered: natural increase, inmigration, and reclassification of areas from rural to urban. While the census figures do not lend themselvesto a break-down of population growth into a natural increase and a migration component, the barangay-specific information which the 1990 Census collected makes it possible to separate population increase stemming from reclassification of barangays from other types of increase.

A comparison of census figures from 1990 with those of 1980 indicate that about 6 million persons in 1990 were residing in urban barangays which, ten years earlier, had been classified as rural. When we apply this figure to the total increase of the urban population between the censuses of 1980 and 1990, then about one half of all urban population growth during the 1980s was the result of barangay reclassification from rural to urban. Detailed region-specific figures are displayed in Table 5.3

Table 5. 1980-1990 URBAN POPULATION GROWTH.
BY GROWTH COMPONENT AND REGION: PHILIPPINES

While for the country as a whole barangay reclassification accounted for 56 percent of all intercensal urban population growth, the contribution of reclassification to the growth of regional urban populations varied from 48 to 90 percent.

Why were so many barangays reclassified from rural to urban between 1980 and 1990? Is it because during the 1980s the process of urbanization has speeded up, i.e., more barangays acquired social and economic characteristics associated with urban living?

The Philippine definition of urban, in use since 1970, specifies a number of criteria that have to be met by a barangay in order to be considered urban. These criteria can be divided into three groups: (a) size/density-related, (b) facility/service related, and (c) labor-force related ones. Among these types of criteria, the Philippine definition gives first preference to size/density, presumably because of the assumption that large and densely populated places will tend to also display urban characteristics. According to the definition, every barangay located in a city or municipality having an average density of 1,000 persons or more is 'urban'. Because of continued high population growth, many cities and municipalities have reached this average density. As a result, all barangays located in them are urban regardless of all other characteristics they do or do not have.4

If we consider only urban growth resulting from increase, natural as well as migratory, then the average annual growth rate of the country's population that resided in urban barangays in 1980 comes down to 2.3 percent, less than half the figure shown on p.8.

2 See, e.g., 1980 Census of Population and Housing, Explanatory Text, p.xi. Manila: National Statistics Office, 1983.
3 The barangay file of the 1990 Census contains information on 41,914 barangays located in 1,610 municipalities or cities. Of these barangays, about three fourths are classified as rural, and the remaining fourth as urban. As result of renaming of barangays or the splitting of barangays into two or more, it is difficult to reconcile the 1990 listing of barangays with listings based on the 1980 Census. Direct comparisons between barangays listed in 1980 and 1990 can be made for some 93 percent of the 1990 barangays which, at the time of the 1990 Census, contained approximately 98 percent of the country's population.
4 A case in point illustrating how the currently used Philippine definition of urban distorts reality is the City of Cebu.

4. FERTILITY

Fertility in the Philippines has been on the decline, albeit a rather slow one, since the 1960s (cf. Fig.4, p.4). Recent estimates of regional and provincial total fertility rates spanning the period 1965 through 1990, document this (see Table 6).

Table 6. TOTAL FERTILITY TRENDS, PHILIPPINES AND REGIONS: 1965-90

With the exception of Region IV, the trend in all of the country's regions was uniformly downward. And Region IV is not an exception either because the indicated upward trend between 1965-70 and 1975-80 is an artifact brought about when, in 1978, a good number of highly urbanized (low-fertility) municipalities bordering the cities of Manila and Quezon were transferred from Region IV to the newly created National Capital Region. Fig.9 on the following page points out (relatively) high and low fertility areas in the country in 1990.

In 1990, the average Filipina started her childbearing career as early as women ten years earlier had done and, as her predecessors, she continued beyond the age of 40. The peak childbearing age-between 25 and 30--likewise remained stable. What did change between 1980 and 90, and uniformly so for women of all childbearing ages, is the volume of births. The total fertility rate, which is represented by the area under the curve, declined by some 15 percent, from 5 live births in 1980 to 4.3 in 1990 (Fig.7).

Fig.8 indicates the range within which regional fertility in the country differed in 1990. In Bicol and the Eastern Visayas, the total fertility level in 1990 exceeded the national level by almost 25 percent, and the national level of 1980 by more than ten percent. By contrast, 1990 total fertility in NCR was one third lower than the average national total fertility, and only one half of that in Bicol and the Eastern Visayas.

Fig.7

Fig.8

Fig.9

5 Madigan, Francis C. "Some Recent Vital Rates and Trends in the Philippines: Estimates and Evaluation." Demography, Vol.2, 1965, pp.309-316; Frank Lorimer. "Analysis and Projections of the Population of the Philippines." In first Conference on Population. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1966, pp.200-314.

5. MORTALITY

During the current century, the mortality level of the Philippines has declined substantially. Around 1950, Madigan and Lorimer pegged Philippine mortality at 20 deaths per 1,000 population annually, and the average life expectancy at birth at 43 years (both sexes combined).5 Some 40 years later, the annual number of deaths per 1,000 population had declined to less than eight, and the average life expectancy at birth had increased by more than 20 years.6

For calendar year 1990, the Philippine Vital Registration System reports 313,890 deaths. If this figure were correct, the country's crude death rate in 1990 would have been 5.2 deaths per 1,000 and almost identical to that of Singapore. While this particular rate is not impossible, its acceptance presupposes the correctness of the registered number of deaths, an assumption which, in view of past trends in Philippine death registration, is unlikely.

To obtain realistic death figures, estimation techniques have to be resorted to that permit to assess the completeness of the level of death registration and to adjust the number of registered deaths according to the estimated level of registration completeness.

For the Philippines and all its regions and provinces, indirect age-specific mortality estimates exist since 1960. According to estimates for 1990, the registered deaths are approximately 30 percent short of the true number of Deaths during that year.7 Some two thirds of all unregistered deaths in 1990 had had occurred to infants (under 1 year of age), and the estimated number of unregistered female deaths was by about 10 percent larger than that of males.

Fig.10

1990 estimates of the country's crude death rate, adjusted for underenumeration, indicate that 8.2 out of every 1,000 Filipinos had died in 1990; for women, the corresponding rate is 6.5. The estimate for men and women combined is 7.4 per 1,000. The 1990 rates for males as well as females are by approximately 12 percent lower than the crude death rates that had prevailed ten years earlier.

The magnitude of a population's crude death rate depends on the population's age and sex structure and, for that reason, the crude rate is not a suitable measure for mortality comparisons over time or across populations. Table 7 shows age-sex-standardized death rates for the Philippines and its regions in 1990. The standard age-sex structure used in the calculation of the standardized death rates is that of the total Philippine population of 1980. The fifth column in Table 7 indicates the extent, in percent, to which any given regional mortality level in 1990, net of age and sex-structural influences, differed from the average national mortality level.

Table 7. CRUDE- AND AGE-SEX STANDARDIZED DEATH RATES, BY REGION:
PHILIPPINES, 1990

Fig.11 on the following page illustrates how mortality in the 1990 Philippines varied by province. The map depicts the deviations of the average provincial mortality levels from the average national mortality level (expressed in percent), similar to the regional differences from the national level shown in column 5 of Table 7 above. Lowest mortality in the country existed in the provinces of Batangas and Pampanga, both located in the vicinity of Metro Manila, and mortality was highest in the Cordilleras and the Administrative Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), regions with large groups of cultural minorities. In the ARMM provinces of Sulu and Tawi Tawi, mortality levels exceeded the average national mortality level by 100 percent.

Fig.11

The 1990 life tables for Filipino males and females shown in Table 8 are taken from Flieger and Cabigon, op.cit. The methods used to estimate them are described in the source indicated.

Table 8. LIFE TABLE ESTIMATES, BY SEX: PHILIPPINES, 1990

Similar estimates for the Philippines and all its provinces exist for the years 1960, 1970, 1975, and 1980. Life table estimates for all 60 cities extant in the Philippines in 1990 were recently commissioned by the National Statistical Coordination Board of the Philippines.8

Table 9 presents time series of infant mortality rates and life expectancies at birth culled from the above mentioned sources.

Table 9. INFANT MORTALITY RATES AND LIFE EXPECTANCIES AT BIRTH,
BY SEX: PHILIPPINES, 1960 - 1990

6 Wilhelm Flieger and Josefina Cabigon. Life Table Estimates for the Philippines, Its Regions and Provinces, by Sex: 1970, 1980 & 1990. HFDP Monograph No.5. Published by the Department of Health, Republic of the Philippines, under the Health Finance Development Project, with the Assistance of USAID. Manila, 1994, pp.200 and 212.
7 Cf. Flieger and Cabigon, op. cit., pp.191-92.
8 Josefina V. Cabigon. "Philippine Mortality in Changing Times." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Canberra: Australian National University, 1990. The 1990 city life tables are likewise unpublished.

6. MIGRATION

The only information source in the Philippines for migration at the national level are the recent population censuses. The term migration in the context of this paper refers to internal migration, i.e. migration within the country or, expressed differently, population redistribution. International migration into the Philippines from abroad was and is, demographically speaking, of little consequence. The 1990 Census registered a mere 70,732 persons, half of them males and the other half females who, in 1985, had lived abroad and established a residence in the Philippines between 1985 and 1990.9 With respect to migration out of the country, the 1990 Census offers no information with the exception of a listing of 'Overseas Contract Workers' who, at the time of the 1990 Census, were either home on vacation or out of the country temporarily (not longer than five years) and, for that reason, still considered part of the Philippine population. The 1990 Census counted approximately 420,000 of such workers, whose absence from the country has little effect on the population age structure but some adverse repercussions on the make-up of the trained labor force. From an economic point of view, the outflow of labor from the Philippines is of importance because it constitutes one of the country's major foreign exchange sources.

Both the 1980 and the 1990 Census asked of all persons five years and older where they had resided five years prior and, if they had moved into their current residence in the course of the preceding five years, the name of the city or municipality in which they had lived before. This information, if made available as given, makes it possible to trace movements during the five-year period preceding the census with respect to migrants' place of origin and, consequently, to delineate migration streams. In the printed census volumes, however, the manner of coding the information obscures the place of origin. Shown is only whether the place of origin was a city or municipality in the same province, in another province, or some (unnamed) foreign country. What the published data permit to obtain is some estimate of the magnitude of intra-provincial, inter-provincial and foreign in-migration of persons who, five years earlier, had lived elsewhere. Not possible is the delineation of intercensal migration streams. The manner of coding makes it likewise impossible to identify intercensal movements from rural to urban or urban to rural places within the country.

Data collected by the population censuses of 1980 and 1990 show that, relative to the 1975-80 period, the absolute number of internal migrants 5 years and older between 1985 and 1990 had increased, from 2.85 to 3.24 million (cf. Fig. 24). However, the proportion of the population above 4 years of age involved in internal migration had decreased. In 1980, some 7.1 percent of all persons 5 and older reported that they had lived elsewhere five years earlier; ten years later, the corresponding proportion amounted to only 6.3 percent.

According to Fig. 12, all decrease in internal migration from the late 70s to the late 80s was the result of a decline in the number of intra-provincial migrants: the proportion that intra-provincial migrants represented of the total population 5 and older in 1990 was some 40 percent smaller than the corresponding proportion 10 years earlier. By contrast, the proportion of inter-provincial migrants had increased by 10 percent. Among the migrants listed in both census years, females outnumbered males.

Fig. 12. INTERNAL MIGRATION OF PERSONS 5 AND OLDER, BY TYPE OF
MIGRATION AND SEX: PHILIPPINES, 1975-80 AND 1985-90

Movements among provinces increased from the late 70s to the late 80s, involving some 2.3 million intercensal migrants in the latter of these two periods. In 46 of the country's 73 provinces in 1990, the proportions of persons that, five years earlier, had lived in other provinces, exceeded the corresponding proportions of ten years earlier. More than one third of all inter-provincial migrants between 1985 and 90, some 812,000, had settled in Metro Manila. If we add to these the approximately 350,000 who had settled in the neighboring provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna and Rizal, the proportion of all 85-90 interprovincial migrants in the country that had settled in and around Metro Manila accounts for one half of all such migrants. By contrast, the total number of inter-provincial migrants who had settled in all of the Mindanao provinces is slightly more than one half of those who had moved to Metro Manila: some 450,000. The trend displayed in the migration figures of the 1990 Census confirms what all censuses since 1970 have shown: the in-migration center of the country is no longer Mindanao but Metro Manila and surrounding provinces.

9 The in-migrants counted by the 1990 Census are only those who had lived abroad in 1985 and established a residence in the Philippines since and who were still alive and residing in the Philippines in May of 1990, the time of the 1990 Census. The actual number of in-migrants from abroad, including Filipinos and foreign nationals, was larger because not included in the 1990 count are those who had arrived since 1985 but in the meantime either had left again or died. Likewise excluded are all children under five years of age who were born abroad and had entered the Philippines since 1985. The same limitation applies to internal migrants; covered are only those who had moved since 1985 and were still present at census time.

III. SELECTED SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS

1. EDUCATION

The education of a population is often assessed in terms of literacy. How valid the equation of literacy with education is obviously depends on the definition of literacy. The definition used during the 1990 Census of the Philippines is a rather broad one requiring a bare minimum to qualify.10 The 1990 Census of Population and Housing classifies some 2.85 million Filipinos ten years and older as illiterate, which is 6.5 percent of the total population above 9 years of age. The proportion of illiterate females was slightly higher than that of males. Of importance is the fact that almost 80 percent of all illiterates in the country resided in rural areas.

The number of illiterates excludes a sizeable group of persons with hardly any education to speak of, as Table 10 suggests. There were close to 30 million persons of age 20 or more in 1990, of whom 2.1 million were classified as illiterate by the Census. This number most probably excludes the vast majority of the 1.7 million who never had finished grade 1 (no formal education) and a good portion of those with 1 to four years of elementary education only. Some 80 percent of those falling into the latter group are not older persons who grew up at a time when education was slowly becoming universal but persons in the best ages between 20 and 45, born after WW ll.

Table 10. PERSONS 20 AND OLDER, BY LITERACY

Of the total Philippine household population of 60.5 million enumerated by the census in May of 1990, 48.9 million were seven years old or older, and 45.6 million of these (93 percent), had been in school during their lives and completed at least the first elementary-school grade. Gender differentials with respect to lifetime school attendance were in-significantly small.

Fig.13. EDUCATIONAL ATAlNMENT, BY SEX:
PHILIPPINES 1990

Fig.14. EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT OF PERSONS
7 & OLDER, BY SEX: PHILIPPINES, 1980/90

Fig.15. EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT OF PERSONS
7 & OLDER, BY REGION & SEX: 1990

During the 1980s, the educational situation in the country improved somewhat for both men and women. The proportion of all persons 7 and older who had never been to school declined from 10.3 percent in 1980 to 6.7 percent ten years later, and the proportion of women who had been enrolled in high school increased by 7 percent. With respect to persons who had gone beyond high school, the situation in 1990 differed little from that in 1980.

The absolute change in the number of educated persons deserves some attention: Between the censuses of 1980 and 1990, persons with some or complete elementary education increased from 21.1 to 24.6 million; the number of those who had been to high school from 8.2to 12.8 million, and those with more than high school from 4.5 to 7.8 million.

At the regional level, the proportions of all persons aged 7 and older who had completed at least pre-school or grade one did not differ widely as far as Luzon and the Visayas are concerned, NCR and the Cordillera excepted. The proportions of persons 7 and older with some education in the northern and central Philippine regions ranged from a high of 97 percent in Central Luzon to 92.2 in the Eastern Visayas. In Northern and Southern Mindanao, the two Mindanao regions with the largest urban centers in the country's south, the proportions of persons with a minimum of education were similar to those in Luzon and the Visayas. In Western and Central Mindanao together with ARMM, by contrast, the corresponding proportions were ten percent lower. In the province of Maguindanao, only 68 percent of all persons 7 and older had completed any grade, and in Sulu, just 61 percent.

10 The 1990 Census of the Philippines defines a literate person as one who can "both read and write a simple message in any language or dialect. A person is considered illiterate if he can only read and write numbers or his own name or if he can read but not write." 1990 Census of Population and Housing, Definition of Terms and Concepts.

2. LABOR FORCE

The potential Philippine labor force is expanding faster than the Philippine population, a fact illustrated in Table 11.

Table 11. PERSONS 15 AND OLDER. BY LABOR FORCE STATUS: PHILIPPINES, 1980 AND 1990

In the Philippines, the minimum age to legally join the work or labor force is 15. The censuses do not define an upper age limit terminating membership in the work force. Between 1980 and 1990, the Philippine population eligible for inclusion in the labor force (15 and older) increased by almost 9 million, or 32 percent. The intercensal growth of this segment of the population was greater than that of the general population, which increased by 'only' 26 percent. The growth of the country's potential work force in urban areas outpaced that in rural areas by a factor of 6. However, this disproportional growth of the urban labor force is in part an artifact brought about by the recent reclassification of barangays from rural to urban.

Still faster than the growth of the potential labor force (population 15 and older) between 1980 and 1990 was that of the actual labor force. The latter is composed of all persons actually holding a job (employed) or looking for one (unemployed). For both sexes combined, this growth amounted to 36 percent (7 million persons). The main contributor to this growth in both absolute and relative terms was the women who, between 1980 and 1990, added four million members to the work force, which is one million more than the number of males added. Despite this rapid growth of the female labor force during the 1980s, the number of female workers in 1990 was just half the number of male workers (7.2 vs. 13.9 million).

Participation in the actual work is usually measured in term of the labor force participation rate, which is the proportion of persons eligible to join the work force who actually have joined. The rate of 57.7 in Table 12 states that, of all persons eligible for the labor force in 1990, 57 percent were holding a job. The extraordinary growth during the 1980s of the female labor force is also reflected in the female labor force participation rate. For males, labor force participation had remained stable during the same period.

Table 12. LABOR FORCE STATISTICS: PHILIPPINES, 1980 AND 1990 (percent)

With respectto unemployment, Table 12 points out that, in 1990, female unemployment out-paced male unemployment by a factor of 2.

Unemployment tends to be high for those seeking their first jobs (labor force entrants). The majority of new entrants is between 15 and 24 years old. By contrast, the experienced labor force, i.e., persons with job experience, tend to have a less difficult time finding a job. Table 13 divides the labor force into persons 15-24 years of age, and persons 25 years old or older and presents unemployment rates for these two groups of the labor force.

Table 13. UNEMPLOYMENT RATES FOR PERSONS 15-24 YEARS OF AGE AND
25 AND OLDER, BY STRATUM AND SEX: PHILIPPINES, 1990

For young people without job experience, unemployment rates were two to three times as high as the rates for experienced workers. For both groups of workers, those below and those above 25, the same patterns observed in Table 19 appear: female unemployment tends to be higher than male unemployment, and for males, employment is easier to find in rural areas, while women tend to have an easier time in urban areas.

A comparison of the types of occupations held by gainfully employed persons at the time of the 1980 Census with those ten years later suggests an ongoing restucturing of the labor market in the Philippines: from occupations in primary industries to occupations in secondary and, most of all, tertiary industries.

Table 14. PERSONS 15 & OLDER WITH GAINFUL OCCUPATIONS,
BY TYPE OF OCCUPATION AND SEX: PHILIPPINES, 1980
(percent)

Table 15. PERSONS 15 & OLDER WITH GAINFUL OCCUPATIONS,
BY TYPE OF OCCUPATION AND SEX: PHILIPPINES, 1990
(percent)

Fig.16. GAINFUL WORKERS 15 & OLDER,
BY OCCUPATION: PHILIPPINES, 1980

Fig.17. GAINFUL WORKERS 15 & OLDER,
BY OCCUPATION: PHILIPPINES, 1990

Between 1 980 and 1 990, the proportion that farmers, fishers and forest workers represented of all persons 15 and older with a gainful occupation in the country shrunk significantly: from 50 percent in 1980 to just a little over 30 percent in 1990. Despite this decline, workers in agriculture and fishing still represented the bulk of all gainfully employed in the Philippines in 1990.

The second-largest occupational group in the 1990 Philippines, 3.8 million, consisted of persons with elementary occupations. One third of them (34.6 percent) are classified as "Agricultural, Forestry and Fishery Laborers", 24 percent as "Domestic Helpers and Cleaners", and an equal proportion as "Market Stall and Street Vendors." The remainder are laborers in construction, transportation and mining, shoe cleaners, window washers, messengers, and garbage collectors. None of these 'elementary' occupations requires much in terms of training, and none commands much pay. Many people holding elementary jobs are self-employed and perform the job because no other job is available. Excessively large proportions of persons with elementary occupations lived in Cagayan Valley, Bicol, the Western and Eastern Visayas, and Southern Mindanao. In The Western Visayas alone, they numbered 520,000 and accounted for more than 30 percent of all persons 15 and older in that region with a gainful occupation.

3. FACILITIES AND BASIC SERVICES

a. Housing. The living quarters occupied by a household are among the best indicators of a household's economic status. In combination with household facilities, they provide a good proxi measure of household wealth.

Philippine censuses provide information on housing quality (construction materials of walls, roofing and flooring), residential crowding (floor space per household member), and household facilities. With respect to housing quality, the information of the 1990 Census permits to divide dwelling units into constructions of (1) solid materials, (2) semi-solid materials, (3) intermediate type constructions, i.e., mixtures of solid and semi-solid materials, and (4) make-shift constructions. Solid materials include concrete, bricks, stones, wood and galvanized iron for wails, and galvanized iron, tiles (concrete or clay) and wood for roofs. Semi-solid materials are bamboo, sawali, cogon, nipa, and anihaw. Makeshift buildings are entirely put together from salvaged materials of all kinds, including cardboard and jute.

In the Philippines in 1990, approximately 50 percent of all dwelling units were of solid construction, 30 percent of semi-solid construction, and ca. 20 percent were of the intermediate type. As Table 16 points out, urban rural differences in housing quality were considerable.

Table 16. PERCENT OF DUELLING UNITS. BY TYPE OF CONSTRUCTION AND STRATUM:
PHILIPPINES, 1990

Regional differences in terms of housing were considerable in 1990. With respect to solidly constructed dwelling units, Bicol, the entire Visayas and Western Mindanao were trailing all other regions of the country.

The least adequate housing in the country aside from no housing at all is huts or shacks constructed entirely from scrap materials. Nationwide in 1990, some 0.7 percent of all Filipino households (ca. 81,000) lived in such huts. Makeshift huts are primarily an urban phenomenon. The proportion of urban households crowded into makeshift housing (1 percent) was more than two times as large as the corresponding rural proportion. Detailed figures show that makeshift housing predominated in regions with large urban populations, NCR being the prime example. Within Metro Manila, makeshift (slum and squatter) housing was concentrated in Navotas, Paranaque, Quezon City, Pasay City, and Manila proper. Provinces with relatively large numbers of makeshift dwellings in 1990 were those containing sizeable urban centers or located in the vicinity of Metro Manila. In Rizal Province, 1.4 percent of all dwellings were makeshift, in Cebu Province, 1.2 percent, in Cavite, 0.8 percent, and in Bulacan, 0.7 percent. However, makeshift dwellings in comparatively large numbers existed likewise in relatively undeveloped rural provinces such as Masbate (2 percent of all dwellings), Basilan (1.5 percent), Romblon (1 percent), Surigao del Sur (0.9 percent), and Palawan (0.8 percent). In Cebu Province, makeshift dwellings were concentrated not only in Metro Cebu, as indicated earlier, but also in the remainder of the Province, where 1.5 percent of all dwellings were built exclusively of scrap materials.

Fig.18.

b. Household Fuel. Households need energy primarily for lighting and cooking. With respect to lighting, the Philippines have embarked on an electrification program for a number of decades. At the time of the 1990 Census, some 55 percent of all households in the country used electricity for lighting. This proportion of electricity-using households represents an increase of of 17 percent over 1980. In terms of absolute numbers, electricity-using households doubled: from 3,217,000 in 1980 to 6,283,000 in 1990. According to Table 17, the uran-rural gap between households using electricity declined during the 1980s, but the gap sis still considerable.

Table 17. NUMBER AND PERCENT OF HOUSEHOLDS USING ELECTRICITY
AS LIGHTING FUEL. BY STRATUM: PHILIPPINES, 1980 AND 1990

The only other energy source of importance in the country used for lighting purposes is kerosene. In 1990, it was still used by more than 40 percent of all households, three fourths of them located in rural barangays. Ten years earlier, kerosene had been the predominantly utilized household lighting fuel, used in 60 percent of all households. Rarely used sources of energy for lighting, employed almost exclusively in rural areas, were LPG (used by 1.9 percent of all households in 1990), Oil (0.1 percent), and others (0.7 percent).

Use of electricity is dependent first on the availability of electricity, but there are a number of other factors as well, factors that prevent private households in barangays with electricity connection to make use of this energy source. According to the 1990 Census of Barangays, some 60 percent of all barangays in the country had electricity connections. In these barangays lived close to 8.8 million households, but only 6.3 million of them used electricity, while 2.5 million did not. It is unknown how many of these latter households were located in sitios a fair distance away from the barangay center and without connection to the barangay power line, but it is known that many households do not connect because they cannot afford to. Not connected households were concentrated in rural barangays, and that among the country's 15 regions, the Eastern Visayas had the relatively largest share of such households in both urban as well as rural barangays.

Fig.19

The probably most important purpose for which households need energy is cooking. Over the last couple of decades, Philippine households have chosen between four types of cooking fuel: (1) wood or charcoal, (2) LPG (liquified petroleum gas), (3) kerosene, and (4) electricity. As illustrated in Fig.20, wood and charcoal are the by far most important types of cooking fuel, used by two thirds of all households (ca. 7.5 million) in the country in 1990. In the short term and for individual households, wood is the economically cheapest fuel available; in the long run and for the country as a whole, it probably is the most expensive since its use contributes significantly to the depletion of forest resources. From a health point, it is the least desirable because the smoke it generates pollutes the air in and around people's living quarters.

Fig.20. PERCENT OF HOUSEHOLDS, BY TYPE
OF COOKING FUEL USED:
PHILIPPINES, 1990

Urban-rural differences in the use of wood for cooking were considerable in 1990. For the country as a whole, the proportion of rural households using wood was twice as large as the proportion of urban households: 43 percent versus 87 percent.

c. Water Supply. The 1990 Census lists six main sources of potable water and classifies the first three as safe, and the remaining as unsafe. The first two safe sources, community water system and piped deep well, are subdivided according to form of access, which may be either private or shared (communal).

Table 18. NUMBER AND PERCENT OF HOUSEHOLDS, BY DRINKING WATER SOURCE AND STRATUM: PHILIPPINES, 1990

According to Table 18, about one fourth of all households in the country, amounting to 3.1 million, had to rely on unsafe water sources. Eighty percent of these households lived in rural areas. The most widely frequented water sources in rural areas were shallow dug wells and springs, lakes, rivers, and rain. Safe water sources in rural areas tend to be communal ones. In urban places, only a little more than one third of all households had their own private water faucets connected to a communal water system. Buying water from street peddlers is primarily an urban phenomenon; in 1990, urban households were three times as likely to buy water from a street vendor than rural households. According to health officials, water bought from peddlers is the most unsafe water for human consumption. In Metro Manila, some 4.5 percent of all households in 1990 bought most of their drinking water on street corners. It occurred most often in Pateros and Taguig, where close to 18 percent of all households relied on this particular water source. Aside from Metro Manila, water peddling was likewise relatively common in a number of provincial urban places: lloilo (ten percent of all urban households), Basilan (11.3 percent), Masbate (7.2 percent), and Tawi Tawi (7.5 percent).

Figure 21 shows the provinces of the country by percent of households with unsafe sources of drinking water in 1990, separately for rural and urban populations. For urban populations, the percentages range from a little over one percent in some of the Central Luzon provinces to over 40 percent in Masbate and Agusan del Sur; for rural populations, they extend from three percent in Central Luzon to 90 percent in Tawi Tawi.

Between 1980 and 1990, the water situation in the country improved in most parts of the country. The only regions in which the proportions of households with unsafe water sources increased were Metro Manila and Central Luzon, the regions with the best drinking water supply in the country. This increase may be the result more of the manner in which the censuses of 1980 and 1990 tabulated their data than of an actual worsening of the situation.

Figure 21

d. Waste Disposal. With respect to human waste, Philippine censuses distinguish between relatively sanitary toilet facilities, and less sanitary ones. Included among the first are facilities such as household-owned or household-shared water-sealed toilets connected to either public sewerage systems , septic tanks or other kinds of depositories. The use of sanitary facilities depends on the availability of running water. Lesssanitary types of toilets, in descending order of preference, are pits which may be closed or open, pail- or similar systems, and 'no facility whatsoever', often referred to as 'wrap-and-throw' method. The latter two kinds of 'facility' usually make people spread their own waste in the immediate neighborhood of their dwellings.

At first glance, it may seem that a water-sealed toilet connected to a public sewerage system is the most hygienic method of human waste disposal. In the Philippines, such sewerage systems are usually found only in larger urban areas. How sanitary such a system really is depends on the type of sewerage: it may be a closed piped system, or one in which the waste is emptied into open sewerage canals (esteros). In the census classification of toilet facilities, no account is taken of this sewerage-system difference.

Less than one half of all private households in the country in 1990, as Table 19 shows, had a sanitary (water-sealed) toilet in their dwellings used exclusively by their members. Together with those households that shared a water-sealed toilet with other households, they account for less than 60 percent of all households in the country. Two thirds of all water-sealed toilets, private and shared, were found in urban households. Every tenth urban household in 1990 either had access to no toilet or used some sort of pail system. The most common toilet facility in rural areas was 'none', in 'possession' of one fourth of all rural households. The proportion of rural households with not sanitary toilet (61 percent) was approximately three times as large as the corresponding proportion of urban households (22 percent).

Table 19. NUMBER AND PERCENT OF HOUSEHOLDS,
BY TYPE OF TOILET FACILITY AND STRATUM: PHILIPPINES, 1990

In Metro Manila, 91 percent of all households used sanitary toilets, three fourths of which were privately owned, and the remainder shared with others. The administrative district with the worst toilet conditions in NCR was Navotas, where only two thirds of all households had access to sanitary toilet facilities, and 21 percent had access to none. The latter proportion is more than twice as large as that in the second-worst NCR district toilet-wise, Malabon (9 percent), and more than three times as large as that found in the City of Manila (6 percent).

e. Household Conveniences. The proportions of all households in the country and its regions in possession of a TV and/or refrigerator are shown in Fig.22. The lower portion of the stacked bars indicates the proportions reported by the 1980 Census; the upper portion shows, aside from the total reached in 1990, the amount added during the ten-year period between the 1980 and 1990 censuses.

Approximately one third of all Philippine households in possession of a TV or a refrigerator resided in Metro Manila. Other regions with relatively large proportions of households with modern gadgets were Central Luzon, Southern Tagalog, and the llocos. The comparatively good position indicated for the Cordillera Region hides the fact that most of that region's affluent households live in the Province of Benguet, specifically Baguio City, while the remaining four provinces of the region have few urban households and even fewer ones with TV or refrigerator. Fig.22 once again demonstrates that Cagayan Valley, Bicol, the Eastern Visayas and ARMM are the 'poorhouses of the country.

Fig.22. PERCENT OF HOUSEHOLDS WITH TV AND REFRlGERATOR
BY STRATUM: PHLlPPlNES, 1990

Data on household telephone connections once more highlight the extent to which development in the country until now has bypassed rural areas. By international standards, the number of households with telephone in the Philippines is small: 3.5 per 100. Almost all of these connections, some 96 percent, are in urban households in selected metropolitan areas: 60 percent of ail households with phone in 1990 were concentrated in Metro Manila, and another 8.5 percent in Metro Cebu, leaving just 30 percent for the remainder of the country. Of all rural households, only3.5 of every 1,000 were connected to a phone line.

Table 20. PERCENT OF HOUSEHOLDS WITH TELEPHONE AND MOTOR VEHICLE.
BY REGION AND STRATUM: PHILIPPINES, 1990

Close to 8 percent of all households in 1990 owned a motor vehicle, including motorcycles. Of these households, 75 percent lived in urban places, and 27 percent in Metro Manila alone. If we accept percent of households owning a motor vehicle as indicator of motor-vehicle density, then this density was twice as high in Luzon (10 percent of all households) as in the Visayas and Mindanao (5.2 and 5.3 percent of all households, respectively).

4. COMMUNITY CHARACTERISTICS

In 1990, the Philippine population of more than 61 million was residing in some 41,300 barangays located in more than 1,600 cities and municipalities. According to the latest census classification, three quarters of all barangays are rural.

The Barangay Schedule of the 1990 Census of Population and Housing provides information on the presence in the country's barangays of six physical infrastructure facilities, five types of commercial and manufacturing establishments, and nine kinds of service and communication facilities. Table 21 lists some of these characteristics and indicates their prevalence in the country's urban and rural barangays.

Table 21 demonstrates very clearly that, with the exception of the presence of elementary schools, urban barangays were better off by far in 1990 than their rural counterparts. And the school exception is just an apparent one. Urban barangays tend to be more clustered than rural ones and, most of the time, a number of neighboring urban barangays are served by one large school which usually is well staffed and equipped. Rural barangay schools, by contrast, tend to be small and less well endowed in terms of personnel and teaching aids.

Table 21. PERCENT OF BARANGAYS WITH SPECIFIED
FACILITIES OR SERVICES, BY STRATUM: PHILIPPINES, 1990

The extent to which rural barangays are poor cousins of their urban counterparts becomes evident from an examination of the individual items in Table 21. With respect to highway connection, 40 percent of all rural barangays were not connected in 1990. Somewhat surprising is the fact that ten percent of barangays classified as urban also claimed to have no direct road connection to national thoroughfares. Examples of such isolated 'urban' barangays are some ten localities in the mountain areas of Cebu City. The provinces with the largest proportions of relatively inaccessible barangays in the country are Mountain Province and Abra, Aklan, and Lanao del Norte.

In 1990, communication facilities (telephone, telegraph, newspaper circulation) were, for all practical purposes, non-existent in the country's rural barangays. The additional fact that a mere 1 1 percent of all rural barangays had a post office makes one wonder how rural people were able to effectively communicate at all, especially in emergency situations. The provinces with the poorest communication facilities in 1990 include all in the Cordillera Region except Benguet (with Baguio City), most in the Cagayan Valley, the island provinces of Mindoro, Palawan, Romblon, Catanduanes, Masbate, the Panay Island provinces of Aklan and Antique, Siquijor in the Central Visayas, Southern Leyte together with the three Samar provinces in the Eastern Visayas, and Zamboanga del Norte, Camiguin, Agusan and Surigao in the northern half of Mindanao as well as all located in the southern part of Mindanao with the exception of Davao del Sur with Davao City.

Commercial establishments likewise were concentrated in urban areas. More than 90 percent of all inhabitants of rural barangays had to go elsewhere to find just a market place. Only manufacturing establishments of some kind such as rice and corn mills, blacksmith shops and various types of cottage industries were found more frequently: in two thirds of all urban, and one third of all rural barangays. Public water supplies (piped community systems) and electric power connections existed in two thirds of all urban and one third of all rural barangays. The regions with the largest proportions of communities without electric power connections were Western and Central Mindanao, and ARMM.

The disparity between urban and rural barangays in the country is likewise in evidence with respect to health facilities. The vast majority of all hospitals and clinics is located in large urban places; rural areas are served primarily by barangay health stations dispensing primary health care. Most of these barangay stations are manned by midwives or nurses and operate only on a few designated days of the week, the presence of (predominantly government-run) barangay health stations. But even in terms of barangay health stations, urban barangays fared better than rural ones. Nationwide and at the time of the 1990 Census, health stations had been established in one out of every two urban, but only one of out of every three rural barangays. A comparison of provincial mortality levels with the proportions of provincial rural barangays with health centers reveals an inverse relationship: provinces with comparatively few health centers in their rural barangays tend to have relatively high levels of mortality.

APPNDIXES

Fig.A1

Fig.A2