Session 5B: Resilience and Social Protection (Auditorium 2)
Moderator: Aiko Kikkawa
Targeting post pandemic poor in the Philippines
David Raitzer and Manuel Albis
In 2019, an innovative quantile-weighted proxy means test model was developed for poverty targeting by the Philippine government. During enumeration of households to apply the model, the COVID-19 pandemic started. This meant that income changes imposed by the pandemic needed to be reflected in the model. In the absence of post pandemic income microdata, a regression based income adjustment using labor force survey microdata enabled the training data and model to reflect post-pandemic household income patterns. Using data from over 15 million households in the Philippines, the model identifies 5.6 million households as eligible for social protection.
JEL Code/s: H53,I32,I38
Family business during the Covid-19 pandemic in Asia: Role of coping strategy and government financial aid
Wataru Kodama, Long Trinh (ADBI), Dina Azhgaliyeva (ADBI), Kunhyui Kim (ADBI), and Peter Morgan (ADBI)
The COVID-19 pandemic has heavily affected economic activities. In Asian countries, it has particularly affected small household business, inducing many governments to provide financial aid to those with household business. Using ADBI’s representative household surveys in seventeen Asian countries from ASEAN and CAREC regions, this paper estimates the impacts of financial aid on household business performance. We find that the financial aid has decreased the probability of business income decline and business closure during the pandemic. We also find that it has encouraged business adjustment, which is associated with better business performances.
JEL Code/s: D13, H12, H31, H84
Metropolitan areas delineation and resilience under public health crisis: Evidence from the Philippines
Yi Jiang, Jade Laranjo
We use nationwide bilateral flows derived from cellphone-based data to delineate metropolitan areas of the Philippines before and after COVID-19 outbreak. We find that before the pandemic there were a number of city and municipality clusters functioning as large metropolitan areas in addition to the three officially recognized metropolises while the latter all have different scopes than the official definitions. Under strict community quarantine policies, the metropolitan areas became fragmented. However, the fragmentation was significantly reduced when the restriction was relaxed. Further regression analysis shows that complementarity of local labor markets contributes to this resilience of metropolitan areas.
JEL Code/s: R11,R12,R58