The implications of labor migration and remittances on poverty are becoming a global issue. The Philippines is considered as one of the largest labor-sending countries in the world. There are numerous studies on remittances and migration and how they contribute to poverty reduction. However, the...

While exchange rate dynamics is an important topic in open economy macroeconomics, the standard tool commonly used to introduce exchange rate dynamics - the Dornbusch (1976) seminal paper along with phase diagram - is not well-suited for undergraduate students as most of them do not have yet a...

For several decades, the government has sought to develop the agriculture sector through programs like agrarian reform, agricultural modernization and rural finance, but farmers and fisherfolk remain to be the poorest sector in the Philippines. This paper seeks to explore ways to improve small...

This paper investigates whether agricultural households in rural Philippines insure their consumption and whether they use remittances, informal loans, or assets as ex post risk-coping mechanisms. Since these households have limited access to formal insurance and credit markets, any shocks to...

This paper compares trends in key economic, political and social development outcomes in the Philippines with those of Latin America, particularly since the 1990s. To do so, it uses standard indicators of development, including measures of institutional quality and good governance. The paper...

Differential delivery dates (D3) of contract obligations characterize most contracts in real life. D3 puts the contractor who delivers last, in the words of David Hume (1769), in “a position of advantage” because reneging on his/her obligation can be profitable. Ex-ante remedies such as...

Evaluation studies on conditional cash transfers (CCT) in the Philippines found small if not insignificantly different from zero effects on household consumption. We use propensity score matching to examine how recipients made use of the money they received, taking into account possible changes...

A framework is proposed to subsume public goods and common-pool resources, respectively, as specific cases of positive and negative externalities. A pure public good is a positive externality whose appropriable benefits are too small or too uncertain relative to the high private cost for anyone...

The economic catch-up of the East Asian region went hand-in-hand with the emergence and even dominance of large quasi-state or private conglomerates. Such for example were the Zaibatsus in the pre-WWII and the Keiretsus of the post-WWII Japan and the Chaebols of South Korea which enjoyed...

We propose a formal re-definition of the concept market failure based on the idea of the imperfect state. In the Neo-classical taxonomy, a decentralized regime of exchange is a market failure if its laissez faire equilibrium solution is welfare-dominated by a technically feasible alternative. If...