Has Foreign Entry Made Domestic Banks More Efficient?

Has foreign entry indeed made domestic banks more efficient? Unite's and Sullivan's study, based on a sample of 16 expanded commercial banks (ECBs) and general macroeconomic data for the Philippines for the period 1990-1998, on the whole, supports the view of a general weakening of relationship-style banking brought about by the liberalization of foreign presence in the Philippine banking sector. This has consequences, of course, to the practices in the domestic banking industry. Read more in this Policy Notes.financial liberalization, foreign bank entry, domestic banks, expanded commercial banks

Enhancing the movement of natural persons in the ASEAN region: Opportunities and constraints

The overall objective of the movement of natural persons (MNP) in the ASEAN region is to contribute to expanding trade in services and to deepening economic integration. However, the regional movement of human resources has proceeded beyond the expansion of trade and has persisted in response to labor market imbalances.Movement of Natural Persons (MNP),ASEAN Framework Agreements on Services (AFAS)

The Influence of Group Affiliation and Ownership Structure on Emerging Market IPOs: The Case of the Philippines

In this paper we report initial returns and long-run performance of IPOs in the Philippines over the period 1987-1997. Within this context we investigate the differential effects on IPO returns of offer size, firm age, industry, market timing, ownership structure, and company affiliation. We find average initial returns of 22.69% for a sample of 104 company IPOs over an 11-year period, 1987 through 1997, and three-year aftermarket adjusted returns of -5.44% for a subset of 65 of these companies. Factors commonly found to affect the level of IPO underpricing are not found significant in the Philippines. Instead, we find that firms affiliated with a corporate group are subject to greater IPO underpricing than unaffiliated firms. We attribute this to affiliated firms issuing IPOs accompanied by a lower degree of information disclosure

Issues and Prospects on the Movement of Natural Persons and Human Capital Development in the Philippine-American Economic Relations

The United States of America is the top trading partner of the Philippines and also the top destination of highly skilled and professional Filipino workers. This paper explores the possibility of a free trade agreement (FTA) that covers the asymmetries of the two countries in labor, services and human resources development, particularly educational services. The existing FTAs of the U.S. were examined to seek for provisions the Philippines may adopt for a freer movement of natural persons. However, there are barriers inherent in the U.S. immigration and recent U.S. Congressional pronouncements to uphold the primacy of their immigration policy, thus, no more similar liberal agreements could be entered into. Issues on the movement of workers, particularly mutual recognition, accreditation, taxation and the refund of social security contributions were raised. For the educational sector, the issue of public subsidy and national treatment of foreign service providers were also brought up to clarify the objective of bringing access to students. The paper concluded that for an FTA concerning the movement of natural persons to materialize, the Philippines should weigh its sacrifices against what it will be requesting from the U.S. within the context of the overall importance of the maximizing opportunities for the Filipino worker

Movement of Natural Persons Between the Philippines and Japan: Issues and Prospects

Historically, the economic relations between the Philippines and Japan have been shaped by factors leading to the movements of goods, capital and people. Lately, the interspatial transfer of people has been defined by the asymmetric needs of each country. Considering the demographic changes in Japan, particularly its ageing population, and the Philippines excess labor and the ability to train health workers, this paper explores the possibility of meeting the asymmetric needs of both countries, examines how welfare and protection can be promoted, and analyzes the impact on productivity enhancements to both countries

COVIDetect: A Desktop Application as a Diagnostic Tool for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pneumonia in Chest X-ray Images Using Convolutional Neural Network

The COVID-19 pandemic has heavily affected the well-being of people worldwide. Current diagnostic tools, like the RT-PCR, are expensive and time-consuming; thus, there is a need for cheaper and faster means of COVID-19 detection. This study proposes using a desktop application with a convolutional neural network (CNN) and visual analysis as a supplementary diagnostic tool for detecting COVID-19 pneumonia in chest X-ray images. The CNN used is a sequential Keras model that was trained and tested through eight epochs using an augmented dataset. Random data augmentation techniques applied were rotation and horizontal flipping, which increased the total images used to 13,584. Visual analysis was created using the Grad-CAM algorithm to determine patterns in chest X-ray images. These were implemented in a desktop application and evaluated by a professional pulmonologist. Results showed that the CNN achieved an average accuracy rate of 97.96% among the three classes, which was superior among related studies. The CNN also achieved a precision, recall, and F1-score of 99.67%, 99.62%, and 99.64% respectively for COVID-19 pneumonia, 99.26%, 94.83%, and 96.99% respectively for viral pneumonia, and 95.12%, 99.42%, and 97.22% respectively for normal chest X-ray images. Meanwhile, the visual analysis was also accurate, as evaluated by a professional pulmonologist, where patterns of haziness were determined. Hence, this could serve as an effective supplementary diagnostic tool for healthcare professionals for faster and more accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 and viral pneumonia patients

Women on Top: Diversity in Gender and Education Profiles of Top Management and Board of Directors of Philippine Publicly Traded Firms

Women have been making headway when it comes to occupying corporate board and senior management positions in companies all over the world, particularly in the Philippines. Stylized facts released by international reports point to the surprising prevalence of women holding leadership positions among Philippine firms. Hence, this descriptive study bridges a gap in the Philippine corporate governance literature by using data on around 250 PSE-listed firms to examine gender diversity composition and trends among CEOs, boards, and top management teams in Philippine publicly traded firms on a five-year interval (i.e. 2003, 2008, 2013) and for the most recent year (i.e. 2014). Additionally, we provide information on the educational profile of CEOs of PSE-listed firms. Our study confirms the existence of a gender gap among governing and managing bodies of Philippine public firms, but observes a gradual improvement in the representation of women in key leadership positions. We also find that most CEOs of PSE-listed firms share a common educational background in terms of undergraduate and graduate degrees received and tertiary schools attended

Gender Diversity in Boards and Performance of Philippine Publicly Traded Firms: Do Women Matter?

The issue of gender diversity in corporate boards has been attracting research interest in various countries because of the many socioeconomic contributions women directors are purported to confer to the firm, some of which involve improved board monitoring quality and a more ethical and democratic form of leadership. This rationale forms part of the “economic case” for women’s participation in boards, apart from the usual grounds of social or equality considerations. We examine this board-level gender diversity issue for the case of the firms traded in the Philippine Stock Exchange during the period 2003 to 2014. Using an unbalanced panel of 2,645 firm-years, we find that greater gender diversity in boards, which in the case of our sample firms also indicates the presence of more female directors in the board, does not significantly affect short-term firm performance as alternatively measured by ROA and ROE, but seems to drive down long-term firm value as measured by Tobin’s Q. Our results are robust with respect to board-level gender diversity measures and are based on estimates that take into account the effects of unobserved individual effects and potential endogeneity of gender diversity. Our findings are consistent with the investor bias theory, which argues that investors collectively drive down the market value of firms with more gender-diverse boards because they have a perceptual bias against women as capable firm leaders and directors. Our results put to question the economic rationale of imposing any minimum gender quota on boards of, at least, Philippine publicly listed firms, similar to the practice in most European countries. We suggest that policy makers must be cautious in proposing quotas that seek to promote gender parity in boards of directors of publicly traded firms based on a claim that it will significantly improve firm performance and shareholder value. Instead, enforcing board-level gender quotas may have to be justified in terms of social equality, business reputation, and purely ethical grounds

Women on Boards of Philippine Publicly Traded Firms: Does Gender Diversity Affect Corporate Risk-Taking Behavior?

The idea that more women belong on corporate boards is attracting increased attention around the world. Some scholars argue that gender diversity on boards improves firm performance and induces more prudent corporate decision-making. This rationale is based on the hypothesis that women are less overconfident and are innately more risk-averse than men. Alternatively, other researchers argue that firms having more female directors are associated with greater corporate risk-taking as the profile of women making it to the board level has proven to be open to greater challenges and risks. Still another strand of literature argues that risk-aversion does not vary between homogeneously male boards and more gender-diverse boards. Thus, in this paper, we report results for our examination of the relationship between board diversity for Philippine firms on corporate risk-taking over the period 2003 to 2015. We use four alternative measures to proxy for corporate risk-taking and employ the two-step Blundell-Bond System Generalized Method of Moments estimation technique to account for endogeneity issues that may influence this relationship. Our findings show that we cannot definitively conclude that the relationship between board diversity and corporate risk-taking is negative. This suggests that the case for greater gender diversity on Philippine corporate boards should be based on fairness, social, and moral considerations, and not to try to improve the level of corporate risk-taking

Proposing a sustainable tourism framework for the Philippines

The travel and tourism (T&T) industry has become a major contributor to growth and development in most economies across the globe (World Travel & Tourism Council [WTTC], 2014). The industry has significantly increased its gross value added (GVA) to the well-being of stakeholders through its direct economic impacts; and indirect and induced impacts to its forward and backward linkages. As such, according to Roe (2001), the T&T evolved into the world’s largest industries, generating approximately 11 percent of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), providing 200 million job opportunities, and transporting nearly 700 million international travellers annually