IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ris/adbewp/0781.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

COVID-19, Food Relief, and Social Distancing: Evidence from the Bayan Bayanihan Program in the Philippines

Author

Listed:
  • Cabuay, Christopher James

    (De La Salle University)

  • Sawada, Yasuyuki

    (University of Tokyo)

  • Tan, Elaine

    (Asian Development Bank)

  • Martinez, Jr., Arturo

    (Asian Development Bank)

  • Bulan, Joseph Albert Nino

    (Asian Development Bank)

  • Durante, Ron Lester

    (Asian Development Bank)

  • Boller, Daniel

    (World Bank)

  • Okamura, Soyoka

    (University of Tokyo)

  • Yanagimoto, Kazuharu

    (Center for Monetary and Financial Studies)

Abstract

At the onset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) lockdown in the Philippines in April 2020, the Asian Development Bank, in partnership with the Philippine government and the private sector, implemented the Bayan Bayanihan (BB) food relief program which served approximately 162,000 households in the National Capital Region and nearby provinces. This study evaluates the impact of in-kind transfers on social distancing by examining the effectiveness of the BB program in restricting mobility by enabling households to stay at home. We leverage plausibly random variations in the timing of the rollout of the program by employing recent developments in estimating staggered difference-in-differences strategies to more accurately identify the effect of the program. We find supportive evidence that the program could generally discourage mobility. Our findings suggest that in addition to mitigating food insecurity, food transfer programs can also generate multiple dividends by helping families stay home and reducing the spread of COVID-19.

Suggested Citation

  • Cabuay, Christopher James & Sawada, Yasuyuki & Tan, Elaine & Martinez, Jr., Arturo & Bulan, Joseph Albert Nino & Durante, Ron Lester & Boller, Daniel & Okamura, Soyoka & Yanagimoto, Kazuharu, 2025. "COVID-19, Food Relief, and Social Distancing: Evidence from the Bayan Bayanihan Program in the Philippines," ADB Economics Working Paper Series 781, Asian Development Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:ris:adbewp:0781
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.adb.org/publications/covid19-food-relief-social-distancing-philippines
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    COVID-19; impact evaluation; mobile phone location data; food program; staggered DID;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D04 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Policy: Formulation; Implementation; Evaluation
    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:ris:adbewp:0781. 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: Orlee Velarde (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eradbph.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.