Commodity prices have become volatile over the past 2 decades, and their recent sharp decline has decreased the consumer price index inflation rates for most economies. While many Asian economies have benefited from low international oil and food prices, commodity exporters have suffered. Thus,...

Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises are a backbone of the Philippine economy. One factor that hinders the growth of these enterprises is their difficulty in accessing finance from banks and other financial institutions. The Credit Surety Fund (CSF) was established to help these...

Local government units (LGUs) in the Philippines are authorized to borrow or incur debts to finance development, but with certain limitations provided by the Local Government Code of 1991. The main controlling statutory requirement is for provinces, cities, municipalities, and villages not to...

Although access to electricity has improved in the Philippines, the country still faces an energy insecurity problem. The country is highly dependent on coal power and large-scale transmission lines to meet its growing demand for electricity; while aiming to supply electricity to the cities,...

In this study, we examine the impact of the STAR highway located in Batangas province, Philippines, on the public finance of the cities and municipalities through which it directly passes. Specifically, we exploit a unique, disaggregated dataset on tax (property and business taxes) as well as...

In this paper, we employ stochastic dominance (SD) analysis on household unit records to measure relative welfare levels and investigate sources of inequality in the Philippines from 2000 to 2012. Using SD techniques developed in Chow, Valenzuela, and Wong (2016), we test for richness and...

The primary objective of this paper is to highlight the contribution of the recent methodological refinements of poverty measures based on counting approaches using ordinal variables to the understanding of the evolution of poverty in Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Using the general...

This paper compares the extent and the nature of the higher prevalence of poverty among disadvantaged ethnic groups in six Asian countries using demographic surveys. We first estimate a composite wealth index as a proxy for economic status, and analyze the magnitude of the ethnic gap in absolute...

Establishing financially inclusive ecosystems for low-income clients, including small and medium enterprises, has become a rising global concern. The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor and the World Bank estimate that around 2.7 billion adults worldwide do not have access to credit,...