Development Economics and Cooperatives – Midterm Exam

Answer the questions exhaustively.

1. Differentiate direct, spillover, and feedback effects of a program or policy.

2. The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or the 4Ps is a government program that gives cash
aid to qualified households to improve Filipino children's health, nutrition, and education
outcomes. What likely behavioral changes can come about in households that are directly
affected by the program? You can read this article for guidance:
https://basis.ucdavis.edu/publication/policy-brief-can-cash-transfers-bring-about-behavioral-
change
3. What probable unintended feedback effects can happen to lead to reduced effectiveness of the
4Ps program?
4. Differentiate the demand-side and the supply-side elements of education policy. How are they
important?
5. In your opinion, does the law that mandates universal access to quality tertiary education
engender winners and losers? Who are the winners, and who are the losers to this policy?
Overall, does it produce positive net benefits? Would you mind doing some research on this
topic before providing your opinion?
6. With the implementation of the K-12 basic education program, young adults after finishing
grade 10, which is equivalent to 4 th-year high school in the previous education system, must take
two more years of more specialized senior high school education before college. What do you
think are the effects that this reform has on students’ learning? Are these benefits justified
relative to the budgetary cost that two more years of high school impart on the government and
their parents (answer by looking at employment potential of senior high graduates vs. other
education-level categories)?
7. Define sustainable development and contrast it to the more familiar concepts of economic
growth and economic development.
8. Answer item 2 of the review questions of chapter 11 in the book of Peter Hess. It is on page 350.
9. Explain the concept of the adjusted net savings rate as a measure of sustainable development.
How does this fair with other measures?

Bonus questions:

1. Mainstream economics has been under aggressive attacks in the past decade. These attacks
come from the media, the academe, and policy spheres. Mainstream economics, they say, lacks
perspective (remember that the main tenet of mainstream economics is that individuals behave
rationally, under a set of complete preferences, with a consistent objective). It arguably cannot
give competent interpretations on power relations across various classes, the institutions’
effects on economic outcomes and economic behavior that may fall under morality like altruism.
Your economics education is primarily taught within the mainstream neoclassica framework;
which concept(s) or theory(ies) do you think is(are) still relevant in the way that it is dealt with in
class? Give reasons for your choice.