The Philippines: Factors Influencing Development & Growth

The Republic of the Philippines is a lower-middle class archipelago country in Southeast Asia. The Philippeans has one of the most rapid growing economies worldwide and this can be attributed to the many factors that play into this country's overall composition. To describe the Philippines, this essay discusses some factors that play into the composition of the country.

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

Upon examining the characteristics of the different stages of the Rostow model the Philippines appears to be in stage 2 of the Rostow model . Stage 2 of the model is called “the pre-conditions for take-off” and reflects many of its traits in those of the Philippines. Stage two describes the majority of investment of a region being put into a single industry, and in the Philippines this would be the electronic assembly industry located in Manila. A factor that keeps the Philippines from moving on to stage three is it’s heavy reliance on subsistence agriculture. A decently large amount of the population in the Philippines relies on or works in subsistence agriculture to make a living. Much of the other income in the country comes from remittances from members of the country who travel abroad to find work. This reliance on outside sources for money also burdens the country and does not encourage its movement into the “take- off” stage of the Rostow model. As for the Wallerstein model the Philippines lies as a periphery at both regional and global scales. The Philippines are periphery, because they get used by most other countries for their relatively cheap labor and resources, but hardly use other country’s natural resources for their own profit. In fact besides cheap manufacturing for wealthier countries the Philippines’s economy relies heavily on remittances from citizens working abroad, This practice further cripples the Philippines’s economy making it difficult to move past being a periphery country.The HDI of the Philippines is .712 which puts it just 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 (.667 in the Philippines), and the Gross National Income or GNI (which is $9,540 U.S.D per capita in the Philippines). All of the data points help reflect the development of the country as a whole. On a regional scale the Philippines sits right in the middle of the other Southeast Asian countries when their HDIs are compared. However on a global scale the Philippines ranks in approximately the 113 ranking of 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 that are 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 all around a very average country, and they express no drastic factors in their development thus far.

The women in the Philippines have fared quite well over the past years, the country even ranking in the top ten most gender equal countries in the world. And while they have maintained their title of 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 for 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. As far as education goes 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 it’s high gender equality. The more educated the 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.

The Philippines is one of the highest ranked environmental sustainability countries in Asia, and even though they may have a few things 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 in comparison to the rest of the world. Another relatively low statistic from the Philippines is the fossil fuel energy consumption percentage out of all energy consumption, which is 62.4%. This statistics is fairly low, but can still be improved upon, and that is exactly what the Phillipines is planning 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 have even taken it a step further and pledged to make the agenda a reality and create a plan (the new Philipine Development Plan) to set the agenda into action. One of the initiatives that the Philippines has taken part of is Eco-tourism. Eco-Tourism is when a country works to make the touristy areas of their country more desirable to vacation goers by making them environmentally friendly. Tourism makes a decent amount of the Philippines’s economy, so implementing Eco-Tourism not only improves this by drawing in more tourism, but also by genuinely helping 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 the 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 is a vertical fashion to be able to grow more in a smaller area of land), and hydroponics ( growth of plants without the use of soil, but with the use of nutrients rich solutions). These technologies have helped improve the sustainability of the Philippines’s agriculture.

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 that I have for the Philippines is to not only continue their overall improvement, but to make sure that it is solid and that their improvements will not eventually fall backwards.

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