Philippine Standard time

Unpacking the Determinants of Financial Resilience in the Philippines


The COVID-19 pandemic exposed financial vulnerabilities as it subjected households to health shocks and income losses. With inequalities likely to deepen, policymakers may benefit from asking: What would make Filipinos financially resilient? This paper examines financial resilience in the Philippines by demographic profile and employs Logistic LASSO Regression, Decision Tree, and other machine learning models to create predictive models and generate inferences on determinants of financial resilience using data from the World Bank Global  Financial Inclusion (Findex) surveys for 2017 and 2021. Variables were chosen based on the components of Salignac et al. (2019)’s Multidimensional Financial Resilience Framework. Empirical findings were consistent across models and suggest that demographics may provide higher predictive value for financial resilience than financial access. Income quintile, saving behavior, and gender emerged as the top predictors in both the 2017 and 2021 survey rounds. Age, saving for retirement, and online payments were also identified as important features for 2017, and tertiary education and medical borrowing for 2021. Insights from this study could provide policymakers with baseline information on financial resilience in the Philippines and support interventions to identify and empower the financially vulnerable towards financial security.


Citations

This publication has been cited time(s).



Related Publications

Philippine Journal of Development 2024, No. 1

PIDS
PJD 2024 Vol. 48 No. 1x
2024
133 Downloads

Understanding Financial Inclusion in the Philippines

PIDS
PJD 2024 Vol. 48 No. 1a
2024
114 Downloads