In 1999, the Philippines was a developing country adjudged by the World Bank to be of middle-middle-incomes status…A quarter-century later, the Philippines is still a middle-middle-income country.
December 31, 2024 marked the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. Twenty-five years is a long time under any circumstances; it is a particularly long time in the life of national economy.
Considering the passage of a quarter-century, the question that suggests itself to a thoughtful Filipino – a paraphrase of the question posed to American voters in the recent U.S. elections of Donald Trump’s supporters – is: In your opinion is the Filipino economy better today than it was in 1997? His answer would have to be ‘no’.
In 1999, the Philippines was a developing country adjudged by the World Bank to be of middle-middle-incomes status. It has been aspiring to be upgraded to an upper-middle-income country. A quarter-century later, the Philippines is still a middle-middle-income country. By contrast, it took less than 25 years for South Korea and Taiwan to make the quantum leap from the Third World to the First World.
A quarter-century ago, the government placed the national poverty-rate at 21 percent, and the respected survey firm Social Weather Stations (SWS) reported that around 50 percent of its survey’s respondents considered themselves poor.
The Marcos administration is aiming to achieve a single-digit national poverty rate by 2028, but its most recent figure is a long way from that goal. The recent SWS feeling-poor survey had close to 50 percent of the respondents considering themselves poor.
A quarter-century ago, the Philippines was a major importer of rice, with National Food Authority (NFA) happily placing orders for foreign rice. In 2024, the NFA no longer had rice-importing authority, but the Philippines had become the world’s No. 1 rice importer. In a near-desperate move to bring down rice prices, the government reduced in 2024 the tariff on rice from 35 percent to 15 percent.
In 1999, education arguably was the weakest part of this country’s social sector, with the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the Organization for Economic Corporation and Development (OECD) giving the Philippines a very low rating and the World Bank reporting that approximately 80 percent of Filipino primary schoolers are unable to fully comprehend what they read in school.
The reduction of education’s share in the 2025 National Expenditure Program (NEP) and former Department of Education (DepEd) head Sara Duterte’s documented misuse of P612 million worth of DepEd confidential funds have made DepEd’s fiscal position even more dire.
(llagasjessa@yahoo.com)
