The administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is pushing for the creation of the Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF). Originally proposed as a sovereign wealth fund, the MIF later on morphed into what can be called a sovereign investment fund (SIF): a state-owned investment fund that aims to...

Following an earlier paper titled 'Population and Poverty: The Real Score' (UPSE Discussion Paper 0415, December 2004), the present paper was first issued in August 2008 as a contribution to the public debate on the population issue that never seemed to die in this country. The debate heated up...

The development literature has long supported the view of connecting the agricultural sector to value chains to boost productivity, expand markets and improve sector competitiveness. While there are several market failures that make this a daunting task, there are opportunities for the private...

Using work from home (WFH) scores obtained by matching Philippine occupations with classifications defined by Dingle and Neiman (2020), this paper estimates that only 12.38 percent of all workers can work from home and 25.7 percent of Philippine occupations are teleworkable, mostly from the...

This paper adopts the approach used by Brussevich et al. (2020) to identify the worker characteristics associated with an increased probability of working from home. Using the same teleworkability scores in the merged 2015 Philippine Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) and 2016 First...

This paper aims to explore empirically, using vector autoregression (VAR) analysis and weekly regional data for the 17 Philippine regions, the interactions between the Covid-19 pandemic, economic mobility, and containment policy. The authors conclude that COVID-19 deaths and incidence primarily...

We use a unique Philippine firm-level database consisting of trade transactions data merged with firm surveys of manufacturing establishments covering the period from 2013 to 2019 to examine which exporting and importing firms are potentially vulnerable to the economic slowdown brought about by...