The paper seeks to take stock of some of the key APEC documents/reports relevant to social protection and safety net programs, and also of the experience of APEC member-economies, with special focus on the Philippines, in implementing social protection measures. In particular, it attempts to...

Since 2011, the government, through the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), has implemented the Social Pension (SocPen) Program which gives a noncontributory monthly pension of PHP 500 to qualified seniors, i.e., indigent Filipinos aged 60 and above. Initially, the DSWD had...

The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program has been much maligned and dismissed as a "dole-out" program. Critics have focused on the fact that it provides cash grants directly to poor families, believing it would promote the culture of mendicancy and dependence. Others believe that the grants would...

The Philippines recently introduced two distinct but related large-scale social protection programs that, first, provides conditional cash transfers (CCT) to poor households, and, second, automatically enrolls them into the government's social health insurance program. This has resulted to...