Suresh Narayanan: This is an interesting paper because it tries to build a case for poverty reduction in the agricultural sector by focusing on developing the non-agricultural sector. This is motivated by the authors’ finding that “non-agricultural growth has increasingly become the main driver of poverty reduction (in the sense of non-agricultural income growth having larger marginal impacts on poverty incidence) in the Philippines.”
The focus of the paper remains unclear; is it the reduction of rural poverty or poverty as a whole? The authors appear to use these terms interchangeably. For example, the authors state “[T]his paper complements the existing literature on pro-poor growth by conducting an econometric analysis identifying, quantitatively, potential determinants of pro-poor growth in the Philippines” (emphasis added). This implies they are interested in poverty reduction per se, not just rural poverty reduction. But then the authors write “Section 3 discusses the data set and...