The Marcos Jr administration is about to miss its full-year economic growth targets for the third year in a row, reducing official projections to statistical fan fiction. Philippine growth is disturbingly exclusionary – and if most Filipinos don’t feel the benefits of growth, it’s worse when even that growth is fading.
The economy has grown by an average quarterly rate of 5.7% since Pres. Marcos took office in July 2022. Yet despite this, there are two million more self-rated poor Filipino families (now reaching 14.2 million, or 50% of total families) and 3.3 million more hungry families (now reaching 6.2 million, or 22%).
Wishful thinking
The president apparently believes that target growth for the year will be achieved because of holiday spending and exports. Pres. Marcos is entitled to be hopeful but, being president, the economy and the increasing majority of Filipinos who are poor and vulnerable deserve more than false hope – they deserve action.
The latest growth targets are set at 5.5-6.5% for 2025, according to the latest assumptions of the Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC). Gross domestic product (GDP) growth slowed to just 4% in the third quarter of 2025 – the slowest in 14 years (not counting the pandemic lockdowns) – making the economy grow just 5% in the first three quarters of the year. The economy needs 7% growth in the fourth quarter to reach the low-end target.
Hoping for a burst in holiday spending is clutching at straws. Household consumption growth in the third quarter is already at its slowest in 15 years, except for during the severe pandemic lockdowns. The Palace also seems unaware that it’s a coin toss whether or not growth will be faster in the fourth quarter from the third quarter. In the last 25 years, growth slowed or was just the same for 12 of those years and faster in just 13 of those years – and there was certainly never anything near the three (3) percentage point surge needed to meet the low end of the growth target for the year.
Exports are much more volatile but the protracted global slowdown does not give much optimism for a substantial surge. Even if exports increase, the country’s exports are so import-dependent that this would be offset by a corresponding spike in imports (because net exports are computed as exports minus imports). In any case, the World Trade Organization (WTO) projects merchandise trade growth to slow from 2.8% last year to 2.4% in 2025 and then just 0.5% next year.
The government fails to understand that the third quarter slowdown is not just from sudden audit pressure in the wake of corruption scandals to avoid leaving paper trails of irregularities. If anything, its’s more fundamentally due to weakening household spending because of worsening joblessness, informality and low incomes.
Better economics
The problem isn’t just apparent overdependence on corruption-driven infrastructure spending but the lack of real structural reform that sustainably boosts domestic aggregate demand. This can be achieved by raising wages, expanding social services, and building real Filipino industries. A wage hike, a wealth tax, and a genuine industrial policy would do far more for meaningful and genuinely inclusive growth and confidence than empty reassurances.
The obsession with GDP growth is actually a huge problem in itself. Instead of headline GDP targets, the government should be setting goals and measuring things that really matter like growth in real wages and family incomes, universal access to health, education and housing, real-time cuts in poverty and inequality, food security and Filipino industrial development, and environmental balance and climate resilience.
Growing millions of poor and hungry Filipinos will attest that GDP growth that doesn’t improve their lives is useless. For instance, GDP doesn’t distinguish between Php100 billion spent on corruption-wracked flood control projects and Php100 billion in health services.
So why does the government keep chasing GDP targets? It doesn’t measure the quality of life of the majority but it does reflect the prosperity of corrupt politicians and contractors, of rent-seeking oligarchs and exploitative billionaires, and of investors circulating their money in the economy – so, there’s why.
If the government really cared about people, it would stop obsessing with GDP targets as if they were ends in themselves and focus instead on industrializing the economy and providing the social services and protection so needed by every Filipino.
But it seems that it doesn’t. Filipinos deserve much more – an economy that delivers decent work, fair incomes, and basic needs not one propped up by pork, propaganda, and wishful thinking.