When poor households face catastrophic events, they do not have any means for risk protection. Access to formal risk protection schemes such as insurance may be a more effective means to minimize the poor households' losses but traditional mainstream insurance has bypassed informal workers and...

The monetary approach to the balance of payments (BOP) takes the view that domestic credit is exogenous to BOP and that it is deteriorated by the excess money, which results from domestic credit expansion. This article determines whether in fact the assertion is true. Utilizing the method...

To evaluate the effectiveness of approaches to improve policies toward the development of small and medium enterprises, this article assesses the efficiency of directed credit programs and the impact of a liberalized design of a specific project.

Despite the government’s credit program approach, access of poor households to microfinancial services has remained limited. This paper explains the microfinance policy environment in the Philippines and evaluates the institutional and financial capacity/performance constraints of MFIs. This...

This paper reports the empirical results of an attempt to develop a statistical classification system for rural banks using common financial ratios as predictor variables. Though it provides a formal and fast way to classify banks, the classical techniques utilized in this paper should not be...

One of the issues contending the rural borrowers, who are composed of small entrepreneurs, fishermen and farmers, is the access to financial services of formal financial institutions. With this fact on hand, this article discusses the issue within the framework of asymmetry of information...

To forecast the Philippine money multiplier, this article utilizes Box-Jenkins Technique that suggests the use of simple autoregressive intermediate moving average (ARIMA) process. Estimation results are discussed in reference to its implications in the future forecast of money multiplier.

The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) Blueprint targets an ASEAN single market in 2015. This is an ambitious reform agenda that seeks to ensure the free flow of services, investment, and skilled labor, along with the free flow of goods and the freer flow of capital, in the ASEAN region. For...

Private firms invest in physical capital and human resource but they are also advised to invest in innovations to be more productive and profitable. Innovations refer to the development, deployment, and economic utilization of new products, processes, and services. It is important for firms to...

It has been suggested that poor people lose from any food price increase engendered by inappropriate policies. In particular, protectionist policies impel an increase in the cost of living, which ultimately hurt the small farm households. Through estimation of household price elasticity of...