Economy

Ranking consistently among the top global providers of business process outsourcing (BPO), the Philippines is now undertaking a significant widening and deepening of its portfolio of third-party services. The sector has begun its transition to higher-skilled and more value-added operations, while also adapting to the challenge of new...



With some 7641 islands inhabited by 175 ethnolinguistic groups, the Philippines is one of the most diverse and geographically fragmented countries on Earth. The modern Philippines has thus long been faced with the challenge of uniting these multiple groups within a single nation, while also allowing local and regional communities...



In 2016 when Filipinos elected a president hailing from beyond the Metro Manila/Luzon region – home to much of the country’s traditional political elite – they also initiated a major push for far-reaching reforms to the constitution. This change, supported by Southern Leyte-born President Rodrigo Duterte, may soon see the...

Recent decades have seen a downward trend in corporate taxation, with headline corporate tax rates falling by 20 percentage points since the early 1980s. The average for advanced economies dipped to 22% in 2015, and investment incentives have further reduced effective rates for transnational corporations. After the 2007-08 global financial...

Benefitting from decades of investment and rising investor appetite for manufacturing projects, economic zones in the Philippines have risen to become an important export promotion tool and investment destination. Economic zone growth has soared in recent years, with the government’s Investment Priorities Plan, approved in 2017, offering...