Mainly due to the dearth of available data, this article empirically illustrates that the practice of using household expenditures/incomes in assessing aggregate poverty tends to its overestimation. In the absence of reliable equivalence estimates, household size should be normalized to improve...

Usual indicators of intertemporal rural performance are technically flawed mainly because of the “shifting” of the physical area of the rural sector as population grows and/or economic activity expands. This problem is illustrated here using Philippine recovery data. Also shown is the fact...

This paper studies the relationship between population dynamics and income growth in the Philippines using data from 74 provinces for the period 1985-2003. Simulation techniques were used to quantify the effect of population dynamics on the differences in income of the provinces. It also...

Provision of safety nets for the poor is a popular call in development policies especially in light of the government’s pursuit of structural and macroeconomic adjustments. A simple exercise in this article shows that even when the only information employed in identifying potential...

Spatial disparities, regional dynamics and centre-region relations are the focus of much attention in the developing world, owing to growing analytical and policy interest, concern over deeply entrenched spatial inequality, transitions from economic crises or command economies, and the uneven...

Despite high agricultural growth, the Philippine unemployed and underemployed has continued to swell. Rural poverty incidence has remained high and income distribution has become less egalitarian. What went wrong? This paper provides a survey of selected topics and issues in the economics of...

Despite the large and expanding literature on pro-poor growth, quantitative studies identifying potential determinants of pro-poor growth remain scarce. This paper addresses this lacuna in the literature for the case of the Philippines. The main driver of rural poverty reduction has shifted from...