The reader is advised to take note of the strengths and limitations of the datasets here on Filipinos international migration, or even the international datasets on international migration and migrants’ remittances. Many datasets are often missing, lagging, or lacking in cross-country comparability. Capturing data on irregular or undocumented migration remains a big challenge (World Bank, 2008). On a global scale, datasets on international migration movements have their own limitations (Michael Clemens, 2008).
Data on Filipinos’ international migration: the migrant abroad and migrant households
These datasets cover the three types of international migration movements by Filipinos (in Commission on Filipinos Overseas, 2008):
- Permanent migrants – These refer to Filipino migrants and legal permanent residents abroad. Permanent migrants may be Filipinos who are Filipino citizens, who are Philippine passport holders, or who have been naturalized citizens in the host country. Popular labels to these kinds of migrants are “immigrants” and “emigrants”. Filipino or Filipina spouses who have married foreign partners and have settled overseas are part of this group.
- Temporary migrants – These refer to Filipinos whose stay overseas, while regular and properly documented, is temporary. This is owed to the employment-related nature of their status in host countries. Temporary migrants include contract workers, intra-company transferees, students, trainees, entrepreneurs, businessmen, traders, and others whose stay abroad is six months or more. These migrants are popularly referred to as “overseas contract workers (OCWs)” or “overseas Filipino workers (OFWs)”.
- Irregular migrants – These are migrants whose stay abroad is not properly documented. They also do not have valid residence and work permits; they may also be overstaying workers or tourists in a foreign country. Migrants belonging to this category shall have been in such status for six months or more. A related label to these migrants is “undocumented migrants”. In Filipino parlance, these migrants are called “TNTs” (tago ng tago, or “always in hiding”).
The government, through the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, annually releases the Stock Estimates on Overseas Filipinos. This dataset presents the number of Filipinos by type of overseas migration (see separate section on the agencies involved in international migration data and their data-capturing methodologies).
CFO also produces the datasets on permanent migrants. Meanwhile, data on land-based and sea-based temporary migrants (the latter covering seafarers in ocean-plying vessels) comes from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA). Both agencies process the documents of permanent and temporary migrants, respectively.
Since the Stock Estimates on Overseas Filipinos are the only one with data on undocumented or irregular Filipinos, this Statistical Almanac used such data source.
Data generated by POEA and CFO are administrative data since these agencies register these outgoing migrants through documentation (thus making their overseas migration “documented”).
The government’s National Statistics Office, meanwhile, has survey data that concern overseas Filipinos. Estimates produced by the annual Survey on Overseas Filipinos (SOF) include demographic information on overseas Filipinos, as well as overseas Filipinos’ remittance behavior. Overseas Filipinos surveyed by the SOF are those who are in the country from April to September.
NSO also has datasets that contain information on the households of overseas migrants. These datasets can be found in the decennial Census of the Population and Housing, and in the triennial Family Income and Expenditures Survey (FIES). Demographic data on migrant households are found in both the Census and in the FIES, while many information on migrant households’ incomes are available in the FIES (the FIES enumerates the sources of income of all Filipino households into three major types: wages and salaries, entrepreneurial activities, and other sources. Under other sources of income is a variable called “cash receipts, gifts, and other forms of assistance from abroad.” This specific variable covers households with a breadwinner abroad, which this Statistical Almanac refers to as migrant households).
Some data on overseas Filipino workers and migrant households can also be found in the quarterly Labor Force Survey of NSO. This survey is important since the government has recently included overseas Filipino workers in the definition of who is “employed”.
The Statistical Almanac also cited data on overseas Filipinos who are tourists (coming from the Department of Tourism), and donations from overseas Filipinos per province coming from the Commission on Filipinos Overseas’ Lingkod sa Kapwa Pilipino program (LinKaPil).
It is to note that datasets produced by the Philippines on her international migrants may differ from datasets produced by the United Nations Population Division, and even by statistical agencies in host countries (a separate section on the agencies involved in international migration data and their data-capturing methodologies explains the differences).
Data on Filipinos’ international migration and development processes and outcomes
Data cited in these sub-sections of the Statistical Almanac were culled from identified papers by academics such as economists, demographers, and statisticians. Authors of these papers used government data, as their data that this Statistical Almanac cited are descriptive data —not inferential data that were a result of regressions and other complex statistical formulas.
Selected data contained in these portions of the Almanac come from the following papers:
- Pernia, Ernesto (2008). “Migration, Remittances, Poverty, and Inequality.” Discussion Paper 2008-01, University of the Philippines (Diliman) – School of Economics, Quezon City, Philippines. In
- Abella, Manolo and Geoffrey Ducanes (2008a). “Overseas Filipino Workers and their Impact on Household Poverty.” Working paper number 5, International Labour Office-Asian Regional Programme on Governance of Labour Migration. Bangkok, Thailand: ILO.
- Abella, Manolo and Geoffrey Ducanes (2008b). “Overseas Filipino Workers and their Impact on household employment decisions.” Working paper number 8, International Labour Office-Asian Regional Programme on Governance of Labour Migration. Bangkok, Thailand: ILO.
- Virola, Romulo, Mildred Addawe and Ma. Ivy Querubin (2007). “Trends and Characteristics of the Middle-Income Class in the Philippines: Is it Expanding or Shrinking?” Presented at the 2007 National Convention on Statistics, 1-2 October 2007, Mandaluyong City, Philippines (organized by the Philippines’ National Statistical Coordination Board).
Data on overseas Filipinos’ remittances
Data on overseas Filipinos’ remittances comes from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). These administrative data are actual cash receipts that major banks report to the BSP, which also monitors an important dataset of transactions between a country and the rest of the world—called the Balance of Payments (BOP).
It is to note that the usually-cited dataset on remittances from overseas Filipinos are cash remittances that all pass through the country’s formal banking system.
Meanwhile, estimated amounts of remittances to Philippine provinces come from the triennial FIES, courtesy of University of Santo Tomas economist Dr. Alvin Ang. These estimates are owed to the fact that FIES data in 2003 and 2006 are regional and provincial-level data are not available (see section on limitations of the data contained in the Statistical Almanac). These descriptive estimates, says Dr. Ang, should not be used for statistical testing.
Socio-economic development and demographic data in the Philippines
These datasets outlined in each and every Philippine province came from various government sources. As earlier mentioned, the Peace and Equity Foundation (one of the Statistical Almanac’s partner institutions) produced a Philippine Provincial Poverty Map that used these datasets. The sources of these data include:
- Income poverty – the 2000, 2003 and 2006 editions of the Family Income and Expenditures Survey (FIES);
- Employment – the 2002 Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS) and the 2003 Labor Force Survey (the 2003 LFS contained the last available dataset at the provincial level);
- Housing – the 2002 Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS);
- Health and Nutrition – data from the 2002 “Operation Timbang” of the National Nutrition Council, and from the publication “2003 Vital Statistics Report” of the National Statistics Office (NSO);
- Education – Basic education data coming from the Department of Education (covering school year 2003-2004 only);
- Governance – 2004 Statement of Income and Expenditures of all local governments released by the Bureau of Local Government Finance (BLGF); and
- Demography – the 2000 Census of Population and Housing.
Global data on international migration
Data used here came from the United Nations Population Division, notably its 2005 World Migration Stock database —said to be the most comprehensive information on international migrant stock for the period 1990 to 2005 (UNPD, 2005 in World Bank, 2008). UNPD data covering 165 countries are based on foreign-born statistics, while those for 50 other countries are based on foreign nationality.
Note also the definitions concerning long-term migrants and short-term migrants. Long-term migrants include persons “who move to a country other than that of his or her usual residence for a period of at least a year,” which makes his or her country of destination as the person’s new country of usual residence. Short-term migrants, on the other hand, are persons “who move to a country other than that of their usual residence for a period of at least three months but less than a year, except in cases where the movement to that country is for purposes of recreation, holiday, visits to friends and relatives business, medical treatment, or religious pilgrimage” (United Nations Statistics Division, 1998 in World Bank, 2008).
Some data cited here on emigration and immigration rates and on skilled emigration come from data produced by the following researchers: Dilip Ratha and William Shaw (2007); Frederic Docquier and Alok Bhargava (2006), and Michael Clemens and Gunilla Peterson (2006).
Global data on international migrants’ remittances
Remittance tables that are shown in the per-country pages in this Statistical Almanac report officially recorded remittances. As the 2008 Migration and Remittances Factbook of the World Bank notes, “The true size of remittances, including unrecorded flows through formal and informal channels, is believed to be larger. Total flows may not always equal the sum of the components a they have been taken from alternative sources” (World Bank, 2008: page xii).
These remittances’ data per country are in many countries’ Balance of Payments (BOP) statistics. On that score, migrants’ remittances are defined here as “the sum of workers’ remittances, compensation of employees, and migrants’ transfers” (World Bank, 2008: page xii). Noticeably, these three items that comprise migrants’ remittances are specific items in various portions of the BOP. The International Monetary Fund even has a BOP Manual that many countries follow.
The following are the definitions of the three types of migrants’ remittances (in World Bank, 2008):
- Workers’ remittances are “current private transfers from migrant workers who are considered residents of the host country to recipients in their country of origin,” especially if they have lived in the host country for a year or for a longer period.
- If the migrant workers who send private transfers to recipients in the country of origin “have lived in the host country for less than a year,” their entire income in the host country is classified as compensation of employees.
- Migrants’ transfers, for their part, are “the net worth of migrants that are transferred from one country to another at the time of migration (for a period of at least a year).”
The World Bank (2008) notes that while the IMF’s BOP Manual has a clear guideline as to the residence of the overseas migrant, this rule is not often followed. For one, many countries compile datasets based on migrant workers’ citizenship instead of their residency status. For another, data are shown entirely either as compensation of employees or as workers’ remittances (the two categories should have been split had these two distinctions been followed, says the World Bank).
Per-country data: socio-economic development indicators
Data here comes from the World Bank’s 2007 Little Data Book. This publication is a pocket edition of the annual World Bank publication World Development Indicators. Data cited in this Almanac that come from this World Bank pocket book cover the years 1990, 2000, and 2005.
Data are shown for economies with populations greater than 30,000, or for smaller economies if they are members of the World Bank. The 2007 Little Data Book also carries this definition of the word “country:” a country cited “does not imply political independence or official recognition by the World Bank, but refers to any economy for which the authorities report separate social or economic statistics”.
Indicators that the 2007 Little Data Book used include some of those being used to monitor countries’ progress in attaining the Millennium Development Goals. Many of these indicators are cited here in this Statistical Almanac (World Bank, 2007).
The Statistical Almanac also followed the regional classifications of countries by the World Bank: East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, Middle East and Northern Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. |
Data Notes 
