The Philippines: Factors Influencing Development & Growth

The Republic of the Philippines is a lower-middle class archipelago country in Southeast Asia. The Philippines has one of the most rapidly growing economies worldwide, and this can be attributed to many factors that contribute to this country's overall composition. This essay discusses some of the factors that shape the development of the Philippines.

Industrialization and Economic Transition

The Philippines is considered a newly industrialized country. This status is based on the fact that the Philippine economy is transitioning from one based on agriculture to one focused more on services and manufacturing. The general industrialization of the Philippines began in 1946 after the country acquired political independence from the United States. This initial movement has steadily strengthened the country’s economy. The land in the Philippines is used for various purposes, with the two most prominent being agriculture (40%) and forestry (25%). Despite most of the land being used for harvesting natural resources and agriculture, the country's exports do not reflect the expected land use. The Philippines’ largest exports are information and communication technologies, followed by electronic integrated circuits. Both of these exports are high-tech and often surprise those who consider the country less developed. The reasoning behind this production is the market for those products and their employers, often wealthy companies from more developed countries that take advantage of cheaper labor and costs in less developed countries.

Economic Models and Stages of Development

Upon examining the characteristics of the different stages of the Rostow model, the Philippines appears to be in stage 2, known as “the pre-conditions for take-off.” This stage reflects many traits of the Philippines. Stage two describes the majority of investment in a region being put into a single industry, which in the Philippines would be the electronic assembly industry located in Manila. A factor that keeps the Philippines from moving on to stage three is its heavy reliance on subsistence agriculture. A significant portion of the population relies on or works in subsistence agriculture to make a living. Much of the other income in the country comes from remittances from citizens who travel abroad to find work. This reliance on external sources for money burdens the country and does not encourage its movement into the “take-off” stage of the Rostow model. According to the Wallerstein model, the Philippines lies as a periphery on both regional and global scales. The Philippines is considered periphery because they are utilized by most other countries for their relatively cheap labor and resources but hardly use other countries’ natural resources for their own profit. In fact, besides cheap manufacturing for wealthier countries, the Philippines’ economy relies heavily on remittances from citizens working abroad. This practice further cripples the Philippines’ economy, making it difficult to move beyond being a periphery country. The HDI of the Philippines is 0.712, which puts it slightly above the middle region of the human development scale. The HDI is derived from three main factors: life expectancy index (71.1 in the Philippines), education index (0.667 in the Philippines), and Gross National Income or GNI (which is $9,540 USD per capita in the Philippines). All of these data points help reflect the development of the country as a whole. On a regional scale, the Philippines sits right in the middle of other Southeast Asian countries when their HDIs are compared. However, on a global scale, the Philippines ranks approximately 113th among recorded HDIs. This seemingly low ranking still puts it at the top of the middle development section of the global data. The Philippines provides natural resources and cheap labor to many wealthier countries but also provides some manufactured items to less developed countries in their region. This information also expresses the tendencies of the Philippines to play the role of a middle economic country as well. All of this data shows that the Philippines is overall a very average country, and they express no drastic factors in their development thus far.

Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment

Women in the Philippines have fared quite well over the past years, with the country even ranking in the top ten most gender-equal countries in the world. While they have maintained their title as the most gender-equal country in Asia this year, they lost their top ten global ranking and fell eight positions to sixteenth. They had closed their gender gap by 80% in the 2019 report, but in the 2020 gender gap report, their rate had dropped to 78%. Much of this change can be attributed to the lowering levels of women in the government system in the past year. Despite the falling equality, the Philippines is still a highly equal country. In fact, the physical health gap in the Philippines has been fully closed and has stayed fully closed. Women in the Philippines even tend to live approximately five years longer than men. In terms of education, women outweigh the number of men in both primary and tertiary enrollment. The higher education of women in the Philippines is one of the leading causes of its high gender equality. The more educated women are, the more empowered they can become because they will know the potential that has previously been reached. And the more empowered they become, the more equal they will be as they challenge the barriers of gender inequality and exceed previous standards.

Environmental Sustainability and Future Prospects

The Philippines is one of the highest-ranked environmental sustainability countries in Asia, and even though there may be a few areas they need to change, they have committed to becoming more sustainable. The carbon emissions per capita in the Philippines is 1.1 tons, which is relatively low compared to the rest of the world. Another relatively low statistic from the Philippines is the fossil fuel energy consumption percentage of all energy consumption, which is 62.4%. This statistic is fairly low but can still be improved upon, which is exactly what the Philippines plans to do. The Philippines was one of the 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly that adopted the Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Philippines has even taken it a step further and pledged to make the agenda a reality and create a plan (the new Philippine Development Plan) to set the agenda into action. One of the initiatives that the Philippines has taken part in is Eco-tourism. Eco-tourism is when a country works to make the tourist areas of their country more desirable to vacation goers by making them environmentally friendly. Tourism constitutes a significant portion of the Philippines’ economy, so implementing Eco-tourism not only improves this by drawing in more tourism but also genuinely helps the environment in the area. Sustainable agriculture in the Philippines has begun to be acted upon through the use of modern technologies. In hopes of boosting sustainability, crop production, and reducing manual labor, officials have begun to implement the following technologies: micropropagation (the use of plant tissues to help grow new plants), vertical farming (the growing of crops on a vertical landscape or in a vertical fashion to grow more in a smaller area of land), and hydroponics (growth of plants without the use of soil, but with the use of nutrient-rich solutions). These technologies have helped improve the sustainability of the Philippines’ agriculture.

Recommendations and Conclusion

One of my biggest recommendations for the development of the Philippines is to become more independent from other countries and to work on strengthening themselves and bringing themselves power. The Philippines has the potential to become a fairly powerful and less periphery country if they can focus on making small actions of improvement throughout all aspects of their country. Another recommendation is not only to continue their overall improvement but to ensure that it is solid and that their improvements will not eventually fall backward.

As seen from the essay, the Philippines may be a less developed country, but it demonstrates many other factors that show its developmental potential. This potential is what pushes the Philippines’ industries and economy forward and gives them their characteristic of rapid growth and overall development.

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