The paper seeks to take stock of some of the key APEC documents/reports relevant to social protection and safety net programs, and also of the experience of APEC member-economies, with special focus on the Philippines, in implementing social protection measures. In particular, it attempts to...

Indigent membership in PhilHealth has surged in recent years, driven by the nation-wide identification of the poor. However, the massive identification has led to the enrollment of more members than official poverty estimates, resulting in leakages in the government's social health insurance...

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...

This paper reviews the current state of and challenges facing social protection in the Philippines. It describes the social protection institutions and the schemes that have been developed throughout the years. It also provides an assessment focusing on coverage, administration, and management....

Standard measures of poverty may reveal nothing about whether the poorest of the poor are being lifted-up or left-behind, yet this is a widespread concern among policy makers and citizens. The paper assesses whether public spending on social protection benefits the poorest and hence lifts the...

Many studies examine the anti-poverty effects of social insurance and means-tested transfers, relying solely on survey data with substantial errors. We improve on past work by linking administrative data from Social Security and five large means-tested transfers (SSI, SNAP, Public Assistance,...

Progressively targeted cash transfers remain the dominant policy response to chronic poverty in developing countries. But are there alternative social protection policies that might have larger poverty impacts over time for the same public expenditure? To explore this question, this paper...

This study evaluates the impact of Microenterprise Development (MD) assistance on the labor supply, income, expenditure, savings, and capital investment of beneficiaries of Pantawid Pamilya, the Philippine government's conditional cash transfers (CCT) program. The assistance is provided by the...

The Philippines aspires to be an upper middle-income country by 2022 as stated in the 2017–2022 Philippine Development Plan. It has also committed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), where the first goal is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. This paper examines the performance of...

In this paper, we comprehensively examine the effects of the Great Recession on child poverty, with particular attention to the role of the social safety net in mitigating the adverse effects of shocks to earnings and income. Using a state panel data model and data for 2000 to 2014, we estimate...