Current Structure and Future Challenges of the Agricultural Sector
This chapter provides an overview of the patterns, composition, policies and institutional environment that have influenced the performance of the agriculture sector in recent years.
Population, poverty, politics and the Reproductive Health bill
The population issue has long been dead and buried in developed and most developing countries, including historically Catholic countries. That it continues to be debated heatedly in our country merely testifies to the lack of progress in policy and action. The Catholic Church hierarchy has maintained its traditional stance against modern family planning (FP) methods,...
What Has Really Happened to Poverty in the Philippines? New Measures, Evidence, and Policy Implications
That poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon is no longer debatable. What remains a contentious issue is whether the various dimensions of individual deprivation should be aggregated–and how these are to be aggregated–into a summary measure of poverty.This study employs the Alkire-Foster aggregation methodology, which preserves the “dashboard” of dimensions of poverty, to systematically assess the...
In search of a strategy for making growth more pro-poor in the Philippines
[with Nobuhiko Fuwa (Waseda University) and Fabrizio Bresciani (World Bank)]
The main driver of poverty reduction has shifted from agricultural to non-agricultural income growth in rural Philippines in the past two decades. Agricultural growth is still relatively more important (vis-à-vis non-agricultural growth), however, in reducing rural poverty in relatively more isolated provinces. Our results suggest that...
MDG 1 in the Philippines: Setting the scores right and achieving the targets
The official poverty data fall short of properly informing public policy and governance concerning the progress, or lack of it, in achieving the country’s commitment of halving, between 1990 and 2015, the incidence of poverty and hunger. Imposing consistency in poverty estimation shows that the
