While education is universally held to enhance a child human development, policies must still contend with parental biases. Here, we investigate if school attendance of young household members aged 6-12 years old varies with their kinship ties to the household heads in the Philippines. Applying...

This paper attempts to trace and find evidence for the linkages between the quality of governance, and development at the local level since the adoption of the fiscal decentralization policy in the Philippines in 1991. The concern since then over the links has been prompted by the observed...

A common feature of the different policy initiatives currently undertaken or considered to improve the decentralization program is a proposal to amend the current formula used in allocating the national government's internal revenues. This formula is known as the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA)...

Using a panel of incumbent provincial governors, this paper estimates the relative contributions of development spending and membership in local political clans to the likelihood of re-election of governors in the Philippines during the 1990s. The results suggest that governors, whether members...

Evaluation studies on conditional cash transfers (CCT) in the Philippines found small if not insignificantly different from zero effects on household consumption. We use propensity score matching to examine how recipients made use of the money they received, taking into account possible changes...

This paper presents the educating effects on civic participation of a citizen feedback mechanism (GOFORDEV Index), which helps promote transparency and accountability in local governance. Using three rounds of household survey data collected during the two-year pilot of the Index in two...

A conceptual framework is developed and used to estimate the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA), other central fiscal transfers and the funds for local public services directly provided by national government agencies in the Philippines. The estimates show that the total central resource transfers...

This paper examines decentralization experiences in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam during the last 18 years (1985-2003). The analysis suggests that decentralization dividends so far have been modest and concentrated in some areas in the country. This is partly macroeconomic and political...

Despite the unrelenting effort by the government, tuberculosis still poses a major health risk and remains today a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. In 2003 prices, the economic cost of TB – measured here as the aggregate loss in income estimated based on a selection model of income...

Like many developing countries, the Philippines has decentralized its public health system. Despite its supposed advantages, however, the decentralization, has not led to widespread improvements in local provision. This is partly because many local government units are found financially...