Poverty incidence has been declining in the Philippines over the past 10 years. However, with the advent of the Asian crisis in 1997, there was a reversal in poverty trends. Estimates indicate that the headcount index has gone up to 40 percent in 1998 from 31.8 percent in 1997. Other...

Innovation in credit programs has alleviated poverty. The premise is that credit accessibility translates into productive activities that aid households to battle poverty. Despite this, the formal rural lending institutions are meeting only a very small percentage of the rural demand for credit....

Despite the government’s credit program approach, access of poor households to microfinancial services has remained limited. This paper explains the microfinance policy environment in the Philippines and evaluates the institutional and financial capacity/performance constraints of MFIs. This...

This paper reviews the Philippine structural adjustment and poverty alleviation experience. A review of the existing analyses of the impact of structural adjustment programs on poverty is given. To provide a background, a brief description of the development experience of the country and the...

Despite high agricultural growth, the Philippine unemployed and underemployed has continued to swell. Rural poverty incidence has remained high and income distribution has become less egalitarian. What went wrong? This paper provides a survey of selected topics and issues in the economics of...

Bottom-up budgeting (BUB) is an adaptation of the participatory budgeting model in identifying and providing solutions to poverty at the municipal/city level. Leaders of civil society organizations engage with LGU officials in formulating a poverty alleviation plan to be considered in preparing...

Despite the government’s credit program approach, access of poor households to microfinancial services has remained limited. This paper explains the microfinance policy environment in the Philippines and evaluates the institutional and financial capacity/performance constraints of MFIs. This...

Credit provision for small and poor households has always been the major element of nongovernment organizations in alleviating poverty. Recently, there has been a move to replicate the Bangladesh Grameen Bank in the Philippines known as Landless People’s Development Fund. This paper assesses...

Usual indicators of intertemporal rural performance are technically flawed mainly because of the “shifting” of the physical area of the rural sector as population grows and/or economic activity expands. This problem is illustrated here using Philippine recovery data. Also shown is the fact...

Existing official poverty statistics cannot be directly utilized for cross-country comparison. This paper illustrates why. It presents an assessment of poverty measurement in the Philippines and Indonesia by examining methodologies used and the disparity in their respective poverty statistics. A...