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...

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...

The Dynamics of Rural Development Project attempts to examine the agricultural sector, which recently has been subjected to comprehensive agrarian reform and rural nonfarm enterprises (RNEs). This paper is an integration of the major findings of various studies under the second set of...

This study focuses on the impact of Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program on the industry’s access to formal finance. The paper has the following objectives: documentation and assessment of bank’s reaction to the program, determination of differences in bank’s approach to lending to...

The paper reviews the innovations developed by some financial institutions to meet the challenges of microfinance and rural finance markets. Innovations could be new products and methodologies or refinements to existing practices that are created in response to market inefficiencies and changing...

This study assesses the state of microinsurance in the country, identifies the players and their performance, and the challenges facing microinsurance development. The term micro pertains to the capacity of a program to handle the small, sometime irregular cash flows of poor households, who have...

Microfinance is an emerging important financial subsector in Asian transition countries. Its role is to improve financial access of the poor and small economic players and thus help them to build assets, thereby contribute to poverty alleviation. This paper provides an overview of rural finance...

The paper discusses critical land issues in the Philippines and assesses the integration of those issues in the national development agenda and poverty reduction strategies. It covers issues related to agriculture, forest and urban lands, land administration and management and government...

Credit is important because economic agents in the agriculture sector who are constrained by liquidity problems may produce sub-optimal outputs. This paper reviews the past and present Philippine agricultural credit and banking policies. It identifies the principal issues in rural credit markets...

While the CARP under the Aquino administration is expected to bring beneficial result, it may also carry with it adverse effects. One aspect that is expected to be affected is the availability and accessibility of credit in the fisheries industry. This paper reviews the existing literature on...