IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/boc/bocoec/236.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Private Transfers And The Effectiveness Of Public Income Redistribution In The Philippines

Author

Listed:
  • Donald Cox

    (Department of Economics, Boston College)

  • Emmanuel Jiminez

    (The World Bank)

Abstract

Private, inter-household income transfers in the Philippines are large and widespread. They are responsive to the economic status of households. Transfers are targeted to households headed by the non-employed and those without access to retirement pensions. Among the very poorest households, decreases in their pre-transfer income appear to prompt large increases in private transfers suggesting that transfers are in part motivated by altruism. The responsiveness of transfers to household income implies that attempts to improve the economic status of poor households could be thwarted by private responses. If a poor household can tap increased government aid, its private benefactors would cut back on their on transfers, For example, we estimate that if unemployment insurance were instituted in the Philippines, the policy would prompt such large reductions in private transfers that the jobless households would only be slightly better off. We also find that social security prompts similar, though smaller, reductions in private transfers, and those government efforts to alleviate poverty would fall short of the mark because of private-transfer responses. In spite of the private-transfer response, however, public transfers still confer benefits are smaller than those implied my analyses that ignore private-transfer behavior.

Suggested Citation

  • Donald Cox & Emmanuel Jiminez, 1993. "Private Transfers And The Effectiveness Of Public Income Redistribution In The Philippines," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 236, Boston College Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:boc:bocoec:236
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://fmwww.bc.edu/EC-P/wp236.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jung, Juergen & Tran, Chung, 2012. "The extension of social security coverage in developing countries," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(2), pages 439-458.
    2. Rob Vos, 1996. "Educational Indicators: What's to Be Measured?," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 10858, Inter-American Development Bank.
    3. Bert Hofman & Susana Cordeira Guerra, 2004. "Ensuring Inter-regional Equity and Poverty Reduction," International Center for Public Policy Working Paper Series, at AYSPS, GSU paper0411, International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.
    4. Jeffrey A. Flory, 2011. "Micro-Savings & Informal Insurance in Villages: How Financial Deepening Affects Safety Nets of the Poor, A Natural Field Experiment," Working Papers 2011-008, Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics.
    5. Devarajan, Shantayanan & Hammer, Jeffrey S., 1998. "Risk reduction and public spending," Policy Research Working Paper Series 1869, The World Bank.
    6. Sumon K. Bhaumik, 2001. "Intergenerational transfers: the ignored role of time," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2001-008, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    7. Chung Tran, 2008. "Transfers and Labor Market Behavior of the Elderly in Developing Countries: Theory and Evidence from Vietnam," Caepr Working Papers 2008-018, Center for Applied Economics and Policy Research, Economics Department, Indiana University Bloomington.
    8. Kananurak, Papar & Sirisankanan, Aeggarchat, 2016. "Do Public Transfers Crowd-out Private Transfers? Evidence from the Thai Socio-Economic Panel Survey," Asian Journal of Applied Economics, Kasetsart University, Center for Applied Economics Research, vol. 23(2), December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:boc:bocoec:236. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/debocus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.