MANILA : Philippine President Gloria Arroyo is to offer a "New Deal" style emergency work programme for the country's poor to help tide them over as the economy slows, her chief aide said on Thursday.

Arroyo ordered her cabinet to draw up "emergency work programmes and livelihood programmes targeting the poor - and also to some extent, the middle and lower middle classes," Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said in a statement.

"In terms of intent and content, these programmes will bear a striking resemblance to the socio-economic interventions" of US President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression, Ermita said.

They are "envisioned to help the poor cope with, and coast through, the adverse repercussions" of the ongoing global credit crunch, he added.

Ermita did not announce a budget for the proposal, though the government has previously announced it would spend more on infrastructure projects to keep the economy from stalling.

Manila has said it is postponing an earlier plan to achieve a balanced budget this year and take on a deficit of up to 75 billion pesos (1.5 billion dollars) to support increased spending.

Two in five Filipinos live on two dollars a day or less.

Roosevelt pumped billions of dollars of state funds to finance large-scale construction projects in his "New Deal" programme in the early 1930s to revive the US economy.

- AFP/vm