This study provides a systematic review and summary of the extant knowledge on the impacts of decentralization on health in the Philippines. Despite the country's twenty-five years of experience in decentralization, little is known about the topic. Overall, our survey shows that the existing...

Despite the Philippines’ sustained economic growth, persistently high malnutrition remains to be a significant issue in the country, especially in a number of subnational regions. This clearly illustrates the urgent need to examine the formulation and delivery of health and nutrition...

The Philippine national government, through the Department of Health (DOH), has a long tradition of augmenting the supply of healthcare workers in underserved areas. Even with the adoption of the Local Government Code in 1991, which shifts the mandate of DOH from being the sole provider of...

We assess the short-term impacts of the Doctors-to-the-Barrios (DTTB), a national physician deployment program in the Philippines that augments the supply of rural healthcare workers in underserved areas, on several health sector outcomes. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that the...

Despite the long tradition of decentralization in health care worldwide, there remains limited evidences on its impact on health outcomes. In this paper, we investigate how the expansion of local government incomes in the Philippines influences household demand for healthcare under a...

The Philippines recently introduced two distinct but related large-scale social protection programs that, first, provides conditional cash transfers (CCT) to poor households, and, second, automatically enrolls them into the government's social health insurance program. This has resulted to...

Health human resource (HHR) is critical in the delivery of health care services. However, the available evidences on their geographic distribution and availability remains quite limited in the scope of cadres studied, i.e., mostly physicians, and in global reach, i.e., mainly in English-speaking...

The Philippines has been experiencing unprecedented economic growth in recent years. This has fueled greater consumption among households, and greater support for the expansion of government entitlements, particularly on health and education. Behind these developments, however, is the fact that...