The University of the Philippines School of Economics – Philippine Center for Economic Development (UPSE-PCED) will hold a seminar on Monday, 27 July 2026, at 10:00 AM via Zoom, featuring Dr. Gabriel Angelo B. Domingo, an applied economist and Assistant Professor at the UP Diliman School of Economics.

Dr. Domingo’s research focuses on Industrial Organization, Macroeconomics, and Applied Microeconomics. During the seminar, he will present his latest research examining the relationship between financial health protection, sovereign debt default, and economic outcomes across countries.

The study contributes to two important strands of economic literature. First, it updates research on the cross-country determinants of financial health protection by using more recent data on out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditure and introducing the “financial hardship” measure—one of the official Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators for monitoring financial protection. The paper compares this newer measure with the widely used catastrophic and impoverishing health expenditure indicators and highlights the strong relationship between financial health protection and GDP per capita.

Second, the research examines the economic costs of sovereign debt default by linking default episodes to GDP per capita using a newly developed sovereign debt default dataset. The study further analyzes how debt default influences out-of-pocket health expenditure by decomposing its direct effects and its indirect effects through changes in GDP. The findings suggest that sovereign debt default reduces real GDP per capita by approximately 2%, with most of its impact on out-of-pocket health expenditure occurring through its effect on economic output.

The seminar will be conducted exclusively via Zoom. Participants are encouraged to register in advance using the registration link or by scanning the QR code provided in the official seminar poster.

Registration Link: https://tinyurl.com/3nesr6dy