This paper examines multihoming in the Philippine online food delivery (OFD) market using two original cross‑sectional surveys of users and delivery riders. We distinguish two margins of platform participation: multihoming as a margin of engagement and single‑homing as a margin of specialization. On the user side, multihoming is more common among users with higher delivery demand, as spreading orders across platforms becomes attractive when demand is frequent enough to justify using two apps. Conditional on single‑homing, platform choice is shaped by a monetary service dimension: users in areas with larger rider networks are more likely to choose GrabFood, while those in areas with larger restaurant networks are less likely to do so. Loyalty also remains a strong sorting device. On the rider side, multihoming is concentrated in thicker local demand environments and is less prevalent among riders who report insufficient ride opportunities on competing apps. Conditional on single-homing, platform choice reflects the way platforms bundle demand, compensation, and administrative requirements, rather than differences in market size alone.
This article examines why domestic food prices in the Philippines, especially rice, have remained high despite falling global prices and trade liberalization. Although the 2019 removal of quantitative restrictions and the introduction of tariffs initially lowered rice prices, the expected continued decline did not occur. Using a Vector Error Correction Model and Structural Vector Autoregressive framework, we analyze price movements across retail, wholesale, and farmgate levels over the past two decades. Results show limited pass-through from international prices to local markets, indicating downward price rigidity. We pinpoint potential contributing factors, including speculative behavior, weak competition, and structural and regulatory barriers, resulting in shocks to stocks and imports. Historical decomposition reveals the increasing influence of wholesale price shocks and inventory fluctuations on domestic price trends. The findings underscore the importance of integrating trade reforms with robust competition policies and effective market governance to manage inflation and improve food security.
Workers’ voice institutions traditionally counterbalance the persistent wage- and term-setting power of firms in labor markets, but can only do so if they exist. Do we observe less union activity in labor markets where employment is more concentrated? We address this question and estimate unionization and bargaining activity across broadly aggregated industry-region labor markets using two register data sources from the Philippines: an establishment-level census and a union and collective bargaining registration database. Our results suggest that local labor market concentration is robustly and negatively associated with new union registrations and new collective agreements. A one-standard-deviation increase in the employment Herfindahl- Hirschman Index (HHI) and the four-firm concentration ratio (CR4) is associated with a 12 percentage-point (pp) and 10.4 pp lower probability of having a new union registration, and a 9.7 pp and 15.3 pp lower probability of having a new collective agreement, on average, respectively. Further, concentration is also associated with lower union membership densities. These results highlight how employer power in input labor markets is plausibly prohibitive for collective action and may deter organizing and bargaining in contexts where only a handful of firms dominate employment. For antitrust authorities in developing country contexts with low union salience and decentralized bargaining systems, a closer examination of the repercussions of concentrated labor markets in merger reviews, competition enforcement, and policy research is a promising way forward.
As the PCC celebrates its tenth anniversary, this symposium of the Philippine Review of Economics serves as a way to look back on a decade of the institution’s growth and to preview the challenges that lie ahead. It does so by presenting research that looks at competition and policy issues in both traditional markets (e.g., rice and labor), as well as digital platforms (e.g., ride-hailing and food delivery apps). Our call for papers sought contributions that would highlight the importance of rigorous economic analysis and its interactions with public policies in today's markets. The selected papers,1 discussed next, provide insights into enforcing antitrust policy within a developing country context and a clear indication that more can still be done to safeguard competition.
This paper examines multihoming in the Philippine online food delivery (OFD) market using two original cross‑sectional surveys of users and delivery riders. We distinguish two margins of platform participation: multihoming as a margin of engagement and single‑homing as a margin of specialization. On the user side, multihoming is more common among users with higher delivery demand, as spreading orders across platforms becomes attractive when demand is frequent enough to justify using two apps. Conditional on single‑homing, platform choice is shaped by a monetary service dimension: users in areas with larger rider networks are more likely to choose GrabFood, while those in areas with larger restaurant networks are less likely to do so. Loyalty also remains a strong sorting device. On the rider side, multihoming is concentrated in thicker local demand environments and is less prevalent among riders who report insufficient ride opportunities on competing apps. Conditional on single-homing, platform choice reflects the way platforms bundle demand, compensation, and administrative requirements, rather than differences in market size alone.
We implement a partially linearized Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to analyze the labor force participation gap. Using data from the merged January 2024 Labor Force Survey and the 2023 Family Income and Expenditure Survey, findings show that over 90 percent of the participation gap arises from the unexplained component which is linked to gender stereotyping. Proxies for the stereotype that men are primary economic providers—such as educational attainment and potential experience—are significant contributors to the unexplained portion, especially for married individuals, but are inconsistent for single individuals. On the other hand, domestic responsibility proxies, such as the nuclear family structure and the presence of children, show negligible or no contributions, indicating that stereotypes assigning household chores and childcare to women do not significantly influence the participation gap. These findings demonstrate that only the stereotype of men as primary economic providers significantly affects the labor participation gap, which is more evident among married individuals and less so among single individuals.
The Grab–Uber merger was a landmark case for the Philippine Competition Commission (PCC). Its decision to approve the merger had a far-reaching impact on passengers and drivers on both platforms. To date, no competitor of the same size and scale as Uber has emerged in the Philippines. Eight years having passed since the merger, it is time to review the approach taken by the PCC in its investigation and approval. This paper examines the appropriateness of reviewing the transaction through the lens of merger control, the gaps in the Philippine merger notification regime with respect to asset-light industries, the definition of the relevant market, and the remedies imposed and their impact on drivers and passengers.
We propose a statutory/norm approach for understanding the emergence of rent-seeking corruption using a 2×2 collective action game. In the status quo, self-interested players converge on a market-failure equilibrium, which is inferior to the cooperative outcome. The government attempts to shift behavior toward cooperation by enacting statutes that prohibit defection through penalties and enforcement mechanisms. The effectiveness of these interventions depends on sufficiently high expected penalties and low implementation costs, which are conditions characteristic of upright governance. When government is weak, however—particularly when it is vulnerable to bribes—statutes are undermined. Income inequality magnifies this vulnerability: elites benefit from the status quo and possess resources to finance bribes that dilute, reshape, or block reforms, while the poorer majority faces prohibitive monetary and electoral lobbying costs. This dynamic produces an Olsonian “tyranny of the minority,” in which a small but affluent group prevails over the numerically larger majority. As a result, the combination of weak institutions and high inequality impedes reforms that would otherwise enhance utilitarian welfare. Our analysis underscores how governance quality and income distribution jointly shape the effectiveness of statutory interventions, offering insight into why national reform initiatives often fail in contexts characterized by weak rule of law.
What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist—the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with. [Schneiderman 1911]
This surveys the main themes found in the work of Joel Mokyr, co-winner1 of the 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel. A final section reflects on possible lessons for developing countries like the Philippines.
Dr. Roberto S. Mariano passed away on April 17, 2025, leaving behind a legacy of excellence in academic publications, teaching, mentorship, and institution building.
The Philippines’ minimum wage debate has intensified following the 2025 passage of House Bill (HB) 11376, which marked the first legislated wage increase in 36 years after the original HB 7787 proposal stalled. While regional wage boards have struggled to keep pace with the economic disruptions associated with the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) law and the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), labor groups continue to advocate for national standardization. This study employs a regional wage partial computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to evaluate four national minimum wage scenarios. Implementing the proposed ₱750 daily wage without productivity adjustments yields severe economic contraction, with real GDP declining 8.31 percent. Furthermore, formal sector employment is projected to fall 37 to 64 percent across regions, leading to displacement of 44,701 to 101,824 workers to informal markets. Even with 20 percent productivity gains, real GDP still contracts 4.96 percent. Regional inflation varies dramatically from -2.98 percent in NCR to 13.07 percent in ARMM, with services sector producer prices increasing up to 88.5 percent. Despite these wage increases, poverty reduction remains minimal at 0.3 to 0.5 percent, while real incomes for informal workers decline 14 to 31 percent due to the labor influx. Only the moderate scenario, which aligns wages to NCR levels (₱515) with ten percent productivity gains, limits GDP decline to 1.46 percent. The simulations confirm theoretical predictions that downward wage rigidity creates substantial formal-informal labor reallocation. Results strongly caution against dramatic uniform wage increases without corresponding productivity enhancements and suggest the need for gradual, regionally differentiated adjustments coupled with complementary policies to formalize employment and boost productivity.
This short note introduces a compact, self-contained 3 × 3 reduced version of the Aghion-Howitt (AH, Schumpeterian, or creative destruction) model. This stylized reduction aims to capture the three core mechanisms in the AH intuition: (i) innovation (endogenous technological progress), (ii) capital accumulation or production, and (iii) allocation of labor to research & development (R&D) which responds to relative returns. This piece writes the three-equation system, explains every symbol, and outlines the steady-state or balanced-growth conditions as well as the Jacobian for local stability analysis. Developing and emerging economies such as the Philippines, where the R&D sector is actively growing, can benefit from understanding the AH model.
This study examines how Filipinos evaluate their current life status and determines the factors associated with achieving a “comfortable life”, utilizing data from the National Economic and Development Authority’s (NEDA) Long-Term Vision exercise (AmBisyon Natin 2040). Instead of measuring subjective well-being in the conventional sense of happiness or life satisfaction, this research interprets respondents’ self-assessed comfort levels—categorized as “poor,” “sometimes poor and sometimes comfortable,” or “at least comfortable”—as indicators of perceived material security and life adequacy. Using a generalized ordered logistic model, the results demonstrate that income, livelihood, and education are critical drivers of achieving at least a comfortable life. Similarly, satisfaction with health, education, and community environment also increases the likelihood of reporting comfort. The findings provide insights into the socio-economic and environmental correlates of Filipinos’ perceived quality of life, as articulated through this national visioning exercise.
This paper draws on the 2019 to 2022 Annual Survey of Philippine Business and Industry to document new stylized facts on the post-pandemic dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) in Philippine manufacturing. The estimates confirm the severe but heterogeneous productivity impact of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) across sectors and regions, with low-tech industries suffering steep TFP declines. Recovery patterns were uneven: large manufacturers rebounded quickly after significant 2020 losses, medium-sized firms showed surprising resilience, while small firms struggled to regain their pre-pandemic productivity. Fixed-effects regressions show the significant and positive relationship of total hours worked, human capital, and tangible investment with TFP. In contrast, the productivity premia from research and development spending, financial access, and intangible investment are not robust after controlling for selection bias. This suggests that highly productive manufacturers compensated their reduced production capacity primarily through efficient labor utilization, skilled manpower, and capital deepening, which enabled agile business adjustments amidst pandemic shocks. Decomposition analysis also reveals the widening TFP gap between small and mediumsized firms, which accelerated between 2020 and 2022 due to increasing differences in endowment and persistent underlying traits. These findings underscore the constraints facing small manufacturers and the growing marginalization of their contribution to post-pandemic productivity growth.
Currency in circulation (CIC) is an important variable in monetary policy as it affects liquidity and guides the currency issuance operations of central banks. This paper proposes a novel approach to forecast CIC using central bank balance sheet variables, namely assets and liabilities other than currency issued. The balance sheet approach is able to generate monthly CIC forecasts as opposed to demand-for-currency models anchored on quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This allows for more responsive currency policy, particularly during crisis periods when precautionary motives intensify—reflected in a decoupling of GDP and CIC—or when spikes in currency demand arise due to heightened transaction motives. Dynamic time series regression models are estimated to operationalize the balance sheet approach and are compared to baseline predictive methods such as Error-Trend-Seasonality (ETS) models, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), and seasonal naïve methods. Results show that including balance sheet variables significantly improves the predictive ability of CIC models in terms of mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root mean squared scaled error (RMSSE). These findings hold across multiple training and test sets through time series cross-validation, suggesting stability of forecast accuracy results.
With its emphasis on incentivizing beneficiary households to invest in the health and education of their children, the Philippines’ Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) is expected to reduce future poverty. Yet, the cash transfers provided under the program have impacts on the household’s current income and consumption, and therefore, on contemporaneous poverty status. While the transfers may be inadequate to lift the poor out of poverty, these could pull them up from the depths of poverty. Using a panel dataset, we estimated the elasticity of the region-level income gap and poverty gap, both based on per capita consumption expenditures, with respect to 4Ps indicators, controlling for other factors. In general, the poverty gap is not responsive to 4Ps indicators. In contrast, the income gap is sensitive to changes in the total 4Ps cash transfers, with the effect moderated by the poverty incidence in the region. The policy implication is that, among the 4Ps beneficiaries, the poor could be granted greater cash transfers to pull them up from the depths of destitution
This paper considers a monopolist who exercises first-degree price discrimination by acquiring consumer data to infer reservation prices. The monopolist uses profiling technology to obtain consumer information whose cost is a function of the fraction of consumers it profiles. We first describe the market equilibrium where consumers do not have access to privacy technology that prevents the monopolist from acquiring their data. The paper then introduces a costly privacy technology that allows consumers to prevent their information from being obtained and used by the monopolist. Equilibrium analysis shows two important results that depend on the level of privacy costs. With sufficiently cheap privacy technology, we show that the monopolist profiles fewer consumers compared to when privacy is not an option for consumers. This reduces the incidence of price discrimination in the market. However, if privacy cost is sufficiently expensive, the monopolist profiles the same fraction of consumers as in the case when privacy was not an option. In this case, privacy technology does not reduce the incidence of price discrimination. Regardless of the level of privacy cost, however, the availability of privacy technology to consumers induces the monopolist to set a higher uniform price level for consumers it was not able to profile. Also, regardless of the cost of privacy, this combination of strategies on profiling and uniform price level reduces the incentive of consumers to use the privacy technology and results in an equilibrium where no consumers choose to privatize. Thus, in equilibrium, privacy technology only acts as a deterrent, and can only function as such, against aggressive consumer profiling and price discrimination if its cost is sufficiently low.
This study examines the impacts of access to electricity on household welfare in terms of employment and income growth in Cambodia. To correct for the endogeneity of electricity, we introduce two instruments: (1) population density at village level; and (2) distance between the center of the village and the nearest electricity substation point. Results show a strong and positive effect of household access to electricity on the probability of participation in wage employment and self-employment in the nonfarm sector. Access to electricity contributes to total household income growth through the growth of household nonfarm income. Evidence shows that electrification has facilitated the shift of household livelihood away from self-employment on farms and to wage work in the nonfarm sector, which eventually served as the main driver of household income growth.
here are at least two distinct but not equally important ways to understand what economic resilience means: one is focused on minimizing deviations of output about its trend and the quick return of output to trend following shocks, while another emphasizes the invariance of the underlying trend of output growth itself to shocks, including the ability to raise potential output despite shocks. The Philippine economy cannot be regarded as resilient using either definition. Anemic growth and the lack of economic resilience in the Philippines are primarily due to the inability of the government to make sufficient and quality investments in critical public goods such as climate change adaptation, health, education, and IT connectivity. The main reason for the lack of public (as well as private) investment is the presence of weak institutions and poor governance, characterized by a political economy process which provides many opportunities for rent-seeking behavior that benefit a narrow set of interests, and where adherence and sensitivity to the rule of law is lacking. Overcoming the problem of weak institutions and poor governance requires a change in the incentive structure faced by key institutions, with clear criteria and targets set and performance tied to tenure in office, so as to make government officials more accountable to the people. It requires a populace that demands accountability, transparency in motives and processes, and timely delivery of intended outcomes from the government, and an unwillingness to accept and trade off short-term token benefits for necessary investments to make growth robust, sustainable, and more inclusive. A well-informed and vigilant populace that demands adequate provision of quality public goods and services from the government is key.
