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Using the Philippines' first-ever nationally representative survey designed for characterizing digital commercial and noncommercial engagements, including ICT use, digital economy, and technology-enabled incidents, we investigate the presence of gendered disparities in online marketplaces. Doing this is consistent with the spirit of a gender and development approach that aims for equal and equitable outcomes between men and women. We verify whether the observed participation of women in online marketplaces results in higher online sales. To establish the determinants of participation and incomes in online marketplaces, we use a Heckman estimator in cognizance of the nonrandom choices people make when they enter online marketspaces. The negative selection indicates that those likely to sell have unobserved attributes negatively correlated with online income. Based on our model's income predictions, men outperform women in online sales. Men still hold the advantage, replicating a trend observed in traditional marketplaces. Results also highlight the importance of skills, digital awareness and habits, selling platforms, and ICT infrastructures. The paper also identifies potential initiatives for online marketplaces.

The world of work is constantly evolving because jobs are created and destroyed, a process that is increasingly becoming conspicuous due to significant technological advances, notably in ICT and computing. Invariably, poor national skills profiles hurt the economy, impede the efficient and timely accumulation of advanced or highly technical skills, and potentially degrade job mobility and wage growth. Thus, understanding the structure of the labor market in the context of occupational skills is essential. This paper provides a skills-based characterization of the labor market and assesses how skills are distributed across the working population, emphasizing key gender differences, and highlighting spatial disparities. It also explains the observed gender pay gap using skills-augmented Mincerian regression models and the 2015 Labor Force Survey. [...]

Current global trends show that boys have consistently underperformed in the academic front, an observation that can be noted in the Philippines as well. At the national level, a clear reversal of the gender schooling gap between men and women is evident. However, patterns also reveal that there are regions in which men have comparable schooling years with women. To make sense of these patterns, there is a need to cast the analysis of human capital accumulation within an intergenerational perspective. This paper adopts a cohort-based, regional perspective to trace the evolution of educational mobility among men and women. Results indicate substantial differences between sons and daughters, with daughters notably outperforming sons in terms of educational mobility and human capital accumulation. [...]

In 2016, the National Economic and Development Authority launched the AmBisyon Natin 2040, which embodies the long-term aspirations of Filipinos for themselves and for the country. At the heart of these aspirations is the idea of social mobility or the movements of entities from lower socioeconomic status to higher socioeconomic outcomes. To some extent, these aspirations reflect a high degree of optimism given that the country has experienced economic growth since 2011. However, issues on poverty and inequality of opportunities remain and these can potentially derail the attainment of these aspirations. Given these, it is imperative to understand social mobility and its drivers. To this end, this paper provides the rationale behind the development of a research agenda on social mobility and reviews materials that can help in quantifying distributional changes and in identifying processes or mechanisms that affect mobility. It also identifies available datasets and existing studies in the Philippines that can be used to enrich the state of social mobility research in the country. Doing so will help policymakers figure out a system of programs or interventions needed to facilitate and sustain upward mobility and at the same time, address issues such as in-work poverty and inequality.

The paper aims to analyze the determinants of household energy portfolio in urban and rural areas and to determine how price shocks and weather variabilities affect energy use in the Philippines. It confirms that energy switching is observed among high-income urban and rural households while energy stacking is observed among rural households - a response to heat index deviation and LPG price shock. The paper also finds that households' energy portfolios have components comprising of modern sources as energy anchors and a component that is most likely to adjust in response to price and weather-related shocks.

Looks at examples of good practices - at the country, bilateral, and multilateral levels, and with special focus on the Philippine experience - for maximizing opportunities for legal migration, especially temporary and circular labour migration. Examines the challenges faced by both labour sending and labour receiving countries and provides practical examples of how the capacities of each can be strengthened to facilitate cooperation in labour and skills exchange.