A Game Theoretic Study on CSR and Government Intervention for Sustainable Production

We use a game theoretic approach to assess how the government can influence firms’ CSR investment and production decisions to enhance social welfare, considering the negative externalities brought by unsustainable production and positive externalities brought by CSR investments. Using a Stackelberg duopoly as a base model and lump-sum tax as the government’s decision variable, we find that when the government chooses not to intervene, it results in greater environmental damage as firms will underinvest in CSR and overproduce in quantity to achieve profit maximization. As such, the model extends to the assumption that the government acts as a benevolent dictator to model how firms will act under a regulated environment to achieve the Pareto optimal outcome. Ultimately, we show that firms have to be placed under a regulated environment to prevent them from exploiting resources and damaging the environment, thereby negatively affecting societal welfare

Philippine Structural Transformation - With or Without Maharlika

It appears the Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF) is a fait accompli. As we write, our finance officials are in New York and Toronto, pitching the MIF to international bankers and representatives of Middle East sovereign wealth funds. This means once President Marcos, Jr. affixes his signature, a newly-created Maharlika Investment Corporation (MIC) will pool, before the year is over, PhP 75 billion in seed capital from the LandBank and Development Bank of the Philippines. With a further PhP 50 billion plus two full years of dividends from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), its nine directors, all presidential appointees, will be able to invest in tradable commodities, overseas instruments, and local development projects to earn dual bottom line returns — financial and social — for the country

Unpacking underperformance: Learning mindsets and the challenge of academic achievement among Filipino students

The 2018 PISA report revealed that 71.8 percent of participating students from the Philippines have failed to reach minimum basic learning thresholds, raising doubts about the state of education in the country. While most East Asian economies lead the world in terms of their significant share of high-performing students, Filipino students are critically left behind by their peers. Before the PISA, the discourse on policies surrounding educational improvement processes lacked a strong evidence base, mainly due to the absence of a robust learner-centered evaluation mechanism. Despite prior discussions on how the Philippines suffers from systemic issues of access and equity, learners’ characteristics and backgrounds were rarely considered. To contribute to the policy discussions, we unpack the primary sources of inequalities in science, mathematics and reading achievement using the PISA data. We also explored how performance is construed by factors such as learners’ backgrounds, learning mindsets (such as the implicit beliefs about intelligence, i.e., growth vs. fixed mindset beliefs), reading difficulties, and other self-reported characteristics. Our results indicate that (1) inequalities are highly persistent among regions, between public and private schools; (2) significant gains in academic achievement are contingent on the interaction between students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and the possession of a growth mindset. However, the associated positive effect of growth mindset on test scores interacts only among higher-SES students and not among students with lower-SES. Further, (3) reading difficulties are prevalent among Filipino students, which are comorbid with science and mathematics achievement. Lastly, (4) students with a history of repetition are severely disadvantaged, particularly males from public schools.The paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of academic achievement through a large-scale assessment framework. Several actionable policy insights related to learning mindsets are also presented in the paper, particularly improving the curriculum and intensifying teacher training. Thus, the education sector needs to strategically commit to long-term education quality goals to prevent the otherwise late detection of learning comorbidities among Filipino students

School learning climate in the lens of parental involvement and school leadership: Lessons for inclusiveness among public schools

Prior literature has shown that school learning climate is critical in helping individual learners meet their educational objectives. In this paper, the role of parental involvement in shaping the school learning climate is explored within a multilevel and hierarchical modeling framework using data from the 2015 PISA round. As the schools’ social and relational character, we find that reducing learning barriers is a critical challenge for school leadership. A welcoming environment for parents, as well as the effective design of effective forms of two-way communications, are positively associated with a substantial reduction in the barriers to improving teacher management’s learning climate. We also find that public schools facing social and educational inclusiveness challenges can dramatically enhance their learning environment by activating specific parental involvement mechanisms. Similarly, principal’s leadership in framing and communicating goals and curricular development to the school is also found to be significant for inclusiveness. However, parental involvement is also found to have potential tensions with school management. The worsening of the learning climate may arise due to pressures brought about by laws requiring parental involvement in schools. Because the learning climate is composed of a wide variety of relationships between and within schools, this work demonstrates that parental involvement is an integral part of school leadership and the school improvement process. Further research attention is encouraged to understand the tensions between teacher roles, principal leadership, and parental involvement through employing other quantitative or qualitative research designs. Because the learning climate is composed of a wide variety of relationships between and within schools, we argue that parental involvement is an integral part of the discourse of school leadership and school improvement process. This work also encourages further research attention to understand the tensions between teacher roles, principal leadership, and parental involvement through employing other quantitative or qualitative research designs

Pathways of educational co-production: The relationship between parental involvement and children’s school participation in India

Most of the education sectors around the developing world face many challenges, the consequences of which significantly matter to its long-term development outcomes. Schools and communities are not exempted from facing wicked problems which affect equity, efficiency, and quality of education. In this essay, we aim to study one of the most basic relational features of education governance in the case of a developing country. We believe that by unearthing such salient features of specific education governance systems, it will allow us to understand how education outcomes relate to the highly localized and contextualized parental involvement patterns.We do this specifically within the context of a fragmented and constrained service delivery system by situating our research project within the public education system of India. The country presently has the world’s largest education sector, counting more than 250 million students in the most recent academic year. We exploit and link two waves of the India Human Development Survey (2004/5 & 2011/12), a series of two linked waves of a nationally representative survey of communities and households.Our results show that parental involvement is temporally and positively related with the school retention. A child whose parent is PTA member is 1.5 to two times more likely to be in school than those children who are not. Moreover, PTA membership is also among the most important correlate of school retention, along with on a wide variety of indicators on caste, schooling, and sanitation practices. Our contribution resonates with education policies concerning parental engagement, while being mainly methodological and empirical. We innovate by utilizing large-scale multi-period household surveys which offer generalizability about parental involvement at the national level. Our choice of India as a context also resonates with the education policy in developing regions, as parental cooperation for a long time is understood inadequately in similar/related contexts

The empirics of financial inclusion in the Philippines

Financial inclusion’s association with economic growth and development has been widely established in the literature. While wide variations of financial inclusiveness among economies persist, basic indicators in the Philippines do not fully relate financial inclusion with household characteristics. Our paper innovates on this research gap and as such contributes to the literature by describing inclusion at the household level. We model financial inclusion in terms of households’ borrowing access to informal, formal and mixed sources. Utilizing the latest round of the Philippines’ Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (2013), our estimates reveal that the odds of borrowing from formal sources is 19.1% less likely for households belonging to the lowest income quintile; households with PhilHealth membership show 49.5% odds in engaging in formal borrowing. Our work emphasizes that policy makers should take into account household-level characteristics in designing policies that should foster deeper and wide access to financial services

International orientation and technological diffusion among SMEs in ASEAN

Entrepreneurial activity has wide and persistent variations across economies in terms of their performance on international market reach. This paper aims to empirically estimate the effects of technology adoption and diffusion to the international orientation of SMEs, which we proxied by the proportion of SMEs’ customers living abroad. Utilizing the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data, our estimates show that owner-managers adopting a technology which are less one year old have significantly higher odds of having more customers living abroad, than those who adopted later technologies. Male owner-managers have higher levels of international orientation, with younger owner-managers having slightly higher odds of breaking into international markets. Our estimates also show that ownership and experience are powerful determinants of international orientation. Within Asean, owner-managers in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines have lower odds of breaking and increasing their levels of access to international markets as compared to other economies covered by the GEM survey

Navigating citizens’ involvement and participation in the pathways to public service and value co-production process

The active and direct involvement and participation of citizens are among the most indispensable elements in the co-production of public services. As one of the most fashionable and most promising themes relating to public service delivery across economies, co-production research is slowly yet accomplishing conceptual unpacking, coalescence and clarity; as a collaborative arrangement between various types of actors and the government, its activation, management and evaluation should attract the attention of scholars from various fields.In this chapter, we propose to revisit the literature on citizen coproduction, an umbrella concept defined as when citizens (or service users, lay-actors or service communities) actively and directly contribute their time, resources and/or knowledge in the design and delivery of public services. While coproduction has been commonly practiced in the private sector contexts (i.e. service co- creation and co-production), it has not received enough attention in the public sector until recently. Moreover, the historical persistence and inertia of public management traditions across countries also inevitably spell the extent, scope and depth at which collaborative or participatory approaches such as service coproduction can be institutionalized and dictate how public values are generated.As part of the dissertation project touching on the governance of education systems, we devote a section of the literature review on to partially introduce parental coproduction specifically in education settings. While we recognize that service construal variessignificantly across countries and levels of public management, education settings offer a particularly interesting context to investigate coproduction’s drivers and outcomes. Our review discusses that involvement and the participation of citizens are necessary pieces of the policy agenda to enhance citizens’ roles in shaping public values of civic interest

Does weak academic performance activate parental involvement in schools? A cross-country perspective from the 2015 PISA round

The empirical literature connecting parental involvement with children’s academic performance is one of the most contentious in education policy debates. Home-based parental involvement, or the role of parenting and the family in ensuring that there is a supportive and conducive learning climate at home, has been known to positively relate with academic performance. However, the activation and mechanisms of parents’ school-based involvement are much less understood. In this paper, we show parents’ involvement with schools is more frequently activated among parents of lower-performing students in 12 countries, inferring that poor academic performance in specific subject areas are the likely triggers of school-to-home interaction. Involvement is also triggered at different score thresholds depending on the country, reflecting cultural differences in parental involvement conventions among schools

The link between high tech export intensity and telecommunications infrastructure

This paper aims to explain the link between economies\u27 high-technology export intensity and telecommunications infrastructure. Using panel data from the World Development Indicators, our generalized least squares estimates show telephone, internet and mobile phone densities to have strong, positive and statistically significant impacts to the share of high tech export shares to total exports. The impact of telephone density is the strongest, with a 0.23 percentage point increase in the share of the high tech for every additional telephone made available to every 100 persons. Internet and mobile phone densities of up to 35.23 and 54.16 per 100 persons respectively show strong impacts, but display diminishing marginal effects beyond optimal density ratios. The paper underscores the importance of telecommunication infrastructures in the growth of high technology intensive sectors, most especially among developing countries. © 2014 IEEE