In almost 30 years of implementation, the Sangguniang Kabataan, which is the Philippines’ version of the village youth council, has faced many challenges, from accusations of exposing ineffective and corrupt practices to young leaders to allegations of electoral malpractices such as...

President-elect Joseph Biden faces challenges both at home and abroad in the aftermath of the Trump administration. The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply affected the United States, with over 23.5 million reported cases by early 2021. Much like many nations under lockdown and reeling from supply...

Martial Law exacerbated cronyism and oligarchy by concentrating power into the hands of one political clan. Technocratic industrial policy combined with political anti-oligarch rhetoric spurred the rationalization and liberalization of different economic sectors, with substantial state support...

Despite studies finding a link between political dynasty prevalence and poverty, empirical evidence in the Philippines shows that the relationship between dynastic concentration and underdevelopment is not the same across regions. We argue that an independent economic elite and high levels of...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected over 200 countries and territories, leading to well over 40 million confirmed cases and over 1.1 million deaths worldwide (covid19.who.int/). While many are hopeful, an effective vaccine is not yet assured, and the world still struggles with the so-called...

Roughly a little under half of the world's population is mired in poverty, most in the developing world--about 3 billion people constitute the global base of the economic pyramid. Building on earlier work by Banerjee and Duflo (2007), this paper uses survey data from three countries in order to...

This paper empirically examines the determinants of child health in developing countries and how public policy may interact with these determinants. It improves on previous empirical studies by conducting a more careful analysis of the determinants controlling for possible endogeneity, and by...

Political dynasties are ubiquitous in the Philippine local government landscape, yet none more so than in the Dinagat Islands, a province where members of one family — the Ecleos — have dominated local government politics since the province was carved out of Surigao del Norte in 2006. The...