Why has the Philippines’ Growth Performance Improved? From Disappointment to Promising Success

Jesus Felipe () and Gemma Estrada ()

No 542, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: This paper analyzes why the Philippines’ growth performance has improved significantly in recent years. As in the medium to long term actual growth adjusts to potential, we posit that the reason behind this improvement is that the country’s potential growth is increasing. We derive an estimate of the potential growth rate, defined as the growth consistent with a constant unemployment rate, through the notion of Harrod’s natural growth rate and Okun’s Law. Kalman filter estimation allows us to obtain a time series of potential growth rate for 1957-2017. Results corroborate that potential growth is increasing. It reached 6.3% in 2017, the highest value during the last 60 years. We find that in recent years, labor productivity growth (technical progress) accounts for most of the country’s potential growth rate, as the trend labor force growth displays a downward trend. A decomposition of labor productivity growth shows that the within effect accounts for 70% of it, and that most of it is due to manufacturing productivity growth. As actual growth in 2017 reached 6.7% and to maintain the growth momentum, Philippine authorities ought to focus on increasing potential growth to enable more room for growth in a stable macroeconomic environment. Finally, two key results emerge from our analysis of output and productivity growth, and employment. First, estimates of Okun’s Law indicate that the response of Philippine unemployment and visible underemployment to output growth is very small. However, the response of total underemployment is positive and significant. Second, productivity growth does not destroy employment.

Keywords: Harrod’s natural growth rate; Kalman filter; Okun’s Law; Philippines; potential growth; underemployment; unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E32 O47 O53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2018-04-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac, nep-sea and nep-war
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.adb.org/publications/philippines-growth-performance-improved Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:adbewp:0542

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, Philippines. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Orlee Velarde ().