Assessing Poverty and Distributional Impacts of the Global Crisis in the Philippines : A Microsimulation Approach

As the financial crisis has spread
through the world, the lack of real-time data has made it
difficult to track its impact in developing countries. This
paper uses a micro-simulation approach to assess the poverty
and distributional effects of the crisis in the Philippines.
The authors find increases in both the level and the depth
of aggregate poverty. Income shocks are relatively large in
the middle part of the income distribution. They also find
that characteristics of people who become poor because of
the crisis are different from those of both chronically poor
people and the general population. The findings can be
useful for policy makers wishing to identify leading
monitoring indicators to track the impact of macroeconomic
shocks and to design policies that protect vulnerable groups.