WEF growth index: Phl ranks 40th
By Czeriza Valencia (The Philippine Star)
Updated January 17, 2017 – 12:00am
http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2017/01/17/1663401/wef-growth-index-phl-ranks-40th
MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines ranked 40th among 79 developing countries in a new index created by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to measure the ability of advanced and developing nations to foster inclusive growth and development.
The WEF’s Inclusive Growth and Development Report 2017 released yesterday contains the Inclusive Development Index (IDI) that ranks 109 economies based on their use of policy incentives and institutional mechanisms to improve living standards.
The report builds on the beta version of the research contained in the Inclusive Growth and Development Report 2015 to create the key performance indicators and the policy and institutional indicators for the new index.
Key performance indicators include gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, labor productivity, median household income, income gini (global income inequality), adjusted net savings, dependency ratio, employment, healthy life expectancy, poverty rate, wealth gini, public wealth as a share of GDP and carbon intensity of GDP.
The WEF noted the limitations of the use of the GDP as a measure of economic progress along with other indicators such as value added, productivity and employment.
“Although the concept of GDP was always intended as a measure of economic activity exclusively, it has frequently been used as a proxy for well-being, even by some economists. In recent years, concerns have grown that GDP may not even be an accurate measure of economic activity after all,” said WEF, noting it is important to come up with indicators for quality of life, as well as soundness of the environment.
Policy and institutional indicators, meanwhile, include education and skills development, basic services and infrastructure, financial intermediation of real economy investment, asset building and entrepreneurship, corruption and concentration of rents, and employment and labor compensation.
The Philippines received an index score of 4.0, the same as El Salvador and Serbia but higher than Cambodia that fetched an IDI score of 3.97.
The Philippine’s IDI score has been experiencing a negative growth of 0.52 percent in the past five years.
The WEF said the country performed poorly in almost all policy and institutional indicators.
“The Philippines has seen a mild decline in its IDI score over the past five years with a score of 4.0 placing it 40th among 79 developing countries,” the WEF said in the country summary.
