This paper discusses the performance of the Philippine economy as it recovers from the Asian financial crisis and the challenges the country faces in sustaining the recovery and propelling the economy to a higher growth path. The economy has some strengths such as relatively healthy financial...

This paper has re-examined the role of Land Bank of the Philippines, a government-owned bank, in light of the recent reforms and developments in the Philippine financial markets. It recommends that the Land Bank should shed off its commercial and investment functions, which can very well be done...

The recent spate of banking and currency crises has underscored the need to develop early warning systems. These are based on economic indicators of vulnerability, which can be identified from models and theories of crises. First generation models focus on the inconsistency of macroeconomic...

This paper has reviewed existing policies and programs to encourage banks to expand their financial services to micro, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MicSMEs) and poor households. The overall policy environment for promoting microfinance in the Philippines has indeed considerably improved...

In a modern economy, the payment system is a major component of the country's infrastructure system. Indeed, no country nowadays can afford to take its payment system for granted. Advances in information technology and changes in laws, institutions and regulations in some countries have...

This paper attempted to test whether efficient cooperative rural banks (CRBs) have a better control of their agency costs. We used two different concepts of efficiency, namely, cost efficiency and alternative profit efficiency, and found somewhat different results from both approaches. Using...

The country's central bank has a profound impact on the lives of all residents in the country. This paper attempted to put some policy issues on central banking in the country in certain perspectives so that policy debates on these issues can proceed with greater focus. More specifically, it...

This paper examines the development of microfinance market from the household perspective as it relates to poverty alleviation. It employs poverty decomposition and dominance analysis. The analysis was divided into four components: comparison between beneficiaries of community-oriented financial...

This paper first examines the extent of cost and profit inefficiencies of the Philippine credit cooperative system using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Then, it looks into the effects of certain variables on the cost and profit efficiencies of credit cooperatives. Three groups of correlates...

This paper has attempted to examine the impacts of competition policy reforms on the efficiency of the Philippine commercial banking system. It uses the stochastic frontier approach to come up with estimates of profit efficiency and cost inefficiency measures. The results are quite interesting....