East Asian Productivity Development: Why did the Philippines fall back?

Ola Honningdal Grytten ()
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Ola Honningdal Grytten: Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Postal: NHH, Department of Economics, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway, https://www.nhh.no/en/employees/faculty/ola-honningdal-grytten/

No 16/2025, Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics

Abstract: During the late decades of the 20th and early decades of the 21th century East Asia experienced significant economic growth. However, the Philippines diverged due to slower growth rates. By establishing new and revised historical series for historical development of GDP in purchasing power parities along with productivity series, the paper concludes that almost lack of total productivity growth caused the bad performance of the Philippines. The reason for the inferior development seem to be dysfunctional political and managerial systems, with significant corruption and lack of investments in infrastructure. The system made foreign direct investments stay low until the last approximately 15 years, when the Philippine economy started a convergence process.

Keywords: Economic growth; Productivity; foreign direct investments; corruption; Asia; Philippines (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E01 E02 E60 N15 N45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2025-08-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-his
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