The Philippines’ Social Policy Response to Covid-19: Troubles with Targeted Social Assistance

Abstract

This report analyzes the Philippines’ ambitious response to the economic risks and dislocation wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020: a set of targeted income support measures that intended to cover unprecedented shares of the population. It contextualizes the assessment of the social assistance measures in terms of the reforms in the over-all social protection system in the last decade, which strengthened the foothold of targeting as a modality of social provisioning. The delays, patchinesss and segmentation of social assistance reveal how these reforms have evidently not enabled the country to build up the institutional infrastructure to respond in a speedy and effective manner to a crisis of the scale that the pandemic poses and doing so bring into sharp focus both the dangers and the limits of reforms that strongly orient social protection systems to poverty reduction rather than universal rights and entitlements to protection.