Electricity serves as a crucial input to many businesses and household activities. As such, the government has historically focused its efforts in expanding the populations' access to electricity. By contrast, electricity reliability has received less attention from policymakers, despite the...

We assessed the impact of compulsory kindergarten education on early-teenage basic and functional literacy skills achievement using a large-scale natural experiment in the Philippines. In 2012, the Philippine government mandated compulsory kindergarten attendance for children aged five years or...

High market concentration in the Philippine domestic shipping industry has always been a subject of concern among policymakers and researchers. While many reforms aimed at improving the level of competition in the industry have been implemented since the 1990s, studies show that domestic...

Accelerating digitalization is one of the cross-cutting strategies identified in the Philippine Development Plan 2023-2028. To ensure that the benefits of digitalization benefit everyone, widespread adoption of the internet is essential. This study provides an overview of the concepts and...

The COVID-19 crisis created conditions for digital finance to accelerate financial inclusion in the Philippines. Anecdotal and survey data suggest that the pandemic has indeed spurred large gains in financial inclusion in the country, with adoption of digital finance as a strong driver. This...

This study presents a small macroeconometric model of the Philippines. The model covers the basic parts of the economy-namely, private consumption and investment, international trade, employment, prices, and basic monetary sectors. Behavioral equations are estimated in errorcorrection form...

This paper examines whether the current level of debt in the country, given the national government's fiscal policy and plans, remains on a sustainable path. By end-2021, a year after the peak of the public health and economic crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the country's...

While the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on the Philippine economy have been widely chronicled, there has not been an effort at an ex-post quantification of the pandemic's impacts using counterfactual analysis. This paper aims to fill this gap. Using a modified version of the PIDS small...

This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Philippine labor market, focusing on employment and real wages and their respective outcomes across sectors and various worker characteristics. To analyze the pandemic's impacts on employment outcomes at various stages of the crisis,...

This study presents a small macroeconometric model with a fiscal sector, extending the model presented in Debuque and Corpus (2022). The model retains the original core blocks of domestic demand, international trade, employment, prices, and monetary sectors, and adds a fiscal sector consisting...