Growth, technological progress and propagation: The formula for development

OR the last few years, the Philippine economy has shown an incredible performance in terms of growth, exceeding 6 percent for the ninth consecutive quarter and averaging a 6.9-percent increase from a year earlier, as per the last GDP report by the Philippine Statistics Authority from November. It is clear that the country, as well as its Southeast Asian peers, is among the decade’s rising stars given predictions of growth from the World Bank that expects it to expand even more in the coming years.

That is why a natural question might come to mind: How is the Philippines still considered an “underdeveloped’ or “less developed” country?

not “an interval in a development continuum along which all countries can be placed” (Sagasti, 1973) and is rather just the other side of the coin when talking about the “developed world”. In fact, underdevelopment and development emerged simultaneously and have been interacting in synchrony as two parts of a system as it is somehow presented in the Depen- dency Theory: An explanation to the increase in wealth of the more advanced nations at the expense of the poorer countries, as a consequence of the division of labor and resources between the “core” and the “peripheral” regions.

Trying to approximate it, the concept behind “underdeveloped country” mainly revolves around the inability to provide acceptable standards of living to the majority of the population, combined with disarticulation (Sagasti) from a cultural and social point of view and domination at the national level as a result of colonization.

the Philippines still ranks 116th