The Philippines, being prone to natural calamities and vulnerable to economic fluctuations, has much to accomplish in terms of improving its population's access to social protection. A focus on women's access is crucial in the light of their significantly lower labor force participation rate...

This study reviews and evaluates the major contributory and non-contributory social protection programs that are currently in place as part of the government's portfolio of social protection interventions, including social insurance (SSS, GSIS, PhilHealth), social welfare programs (e.g.,...

This paper reviews the current state of and challenges facing social protection in the Philippines. It describes the social protection institutions and the schemes that have been developed throughout the years. It also provides an assessment focusing on coverage, administration, and management....

This study assesses the state of microinsurance in the country, identifies the players and their performance, and the challenges facing microinsurance development. The term micro pertains to the capacity of a program to handle the small, sometime irregular cash flows of poor households, who have...

The COVID-19 pandemic has such a wide-reaching and sudden adverse impact on people's livelihoods. For a country like the Philippines which significantly relies on overseas remittances to boost household consumption, the return of hundreds of thousands of OFWs is a great reminder of the need for...

Indigent membership in PhilHealth has surged in recent years, driven by the nation-wide identification of the poor. However, the massive identification has led to the enrollment of more members than official poverty estimates, resulting in leakages in the government's social health insurance...

The Philippines is identified as one of the countries with an ageing population, as the proportion of persons aged 60 and above is at 7.4 percent in 2015 and is projected to increase to 15.9 percent by 2045. Senior citizens tend to have higher prevalence of various medical diseases and...

This study evaluates the impact of Microenterprise Development (MD) assistance on the labor supply, income, expenditure, savings, and capital investment of beneficiaries of Pantawid Pamilya, the Philippine government's conditional cash transfers (CCT) program. The assistance is provided by the...

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...