Theoretical and empirical support for a more liberal trading environment has grown increasingly over the years. In the last decade, many countries have aggressively pursued unilateral trade liberalization. Based on decadal growth rates, globalizing developing countries has outpaced growth of...

Every political dispensation in recent decades has taken the view that the country has to be able to feed itself. For the country’s political leaders and the agriculture bureaucracy, this has meant that rice, the country’s staple food, has to be locally produced at quantity sufficient to...

The high level of extreme poverty or those experiencing hunger in the country is the most pressing issue that needs to be addressed by our policymakers. Official government statistics and data from self-rated hunger surveys show an increasing trend in hunger incidence among households. On the...

The population debate in the country has been dynamic and contentious. On the one hand, proponents of population management say that the rapid population growth in the Philippines has hindered the country’s economic development. On the other hand, others are saying that population growth is...

Financial institutions hold risks in their investments that can potentially affect their ability to serve their clients. For banks to weigh their risks, Value-at-Risk (VaR) methodology is used, which involves studying the distribution of losses and formulating a statistic from this distribution....

Reducing hunger incidence in the country is still the major policy challenge confronting our leaders today. Statistics on hunger produced by both government and private institutions show a very slow reduction in hunger incidence over the last five years. Official data from Philippines Statistics...

The estimated Vector AutoRegressive (VAR) model is sensitive to model misspecifications, such as omitted variables, incorrect lag-length, and excluded moving average terms, which results in biased and inconsistent parameter estimates. Furthermore, the symmetric VAR model is more likely...

Wind energy is the fastest growing renewable energy technology. Wind turbines do not produce any form of pollution and when strategically placed, it naturally blends with the natural landscape. In the long run, the cost of electricity using wind turbines is cheaper than conventional power plants...

Hedging strategies have become more and more complicated as assets being traded have become more interrelated to each other. Thus, the estimation of risks for optimal hedging does not involve only the quantification of individual volatilities but also include their pairwise correlations....

The high poverty incidence in the county is a concern that needs to be addressed by our policy makers. Official poverty statistics from the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) shows that the reduction in poverty over the past two decades has been quite dismal from 38% in 1988 to 26%...