A Documentation of the Philippines’ Family Income and Expenditure Survey

The quality of poverty estimates relies heavily on the data sources. One of the sources of data for poverty estimation in the Philippines is the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES). The FIES is the source of detailed information on income and expenditures of Filipino families. Conducted by the National Statistics Office every three year, it is an input to the calculation of critical poverty data necessary to monitor the condition of the poor in the country. In this document, one will be able to look into how the FIES is administered, how it evolved through time, how the concepts of family and income are defined, what the survey covers, how much it costs to conduct the FIES, how detailed the survey questions are, how long it takes to complete the enumeration, and what the issues surrounding it are.