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...

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...

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 Philippines is slowly ageing. In a little over a decade, the country’s elderly will comprise at least seven percent of the total population. This rising tide may pose some substantial burden to the country's resources. But the same economic and demographic forces that will eventually lead...

Selected components of the NTA flow accounts were estimated for the Philippines for the years 1991, 1999, and 2011 by urban-rural residence and by income group. Three income groups are defined, referred to as income terciles, and thus estimates were produced for a total of six groups - three...

The Complete Treatment Pack (COMPACK) program is a medicine access program designed to reach the poorest of the poor with complete treatment regimens for the top most common diseases in the country. The program aims to address the increasing morbidity and mortality due to these common diseases...

Men and women play important and complementary roles in the economy. However, the activities that they perform are often valued differently, if at all. In this study, we provide new estimates of the value of men and women's work in the Philippines using the National Transfer Account and the...

In response to the effects of super typhoon Yolanda, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) implemented an unconditional cash transfer (UCT) program that provided emergency relief to 10,000 vulnerable families in Tacloban City and neighboring areas. This paper describes and assesses the...

This paper has two parts. The first part presents and discusses the 2011 Philippine National Transfer Accounts (NTA) estimates for selected flow accounts components, the most recent estimates available for the country, and compares the 2011 to the 1991 and 1999 estimates. The second part, also...