BAGUIO CITY – The Cordillera’s economy expanded by around 4.8 percent from the PhP360.90 billion output in 2023 to more than PhP378.26 billion last year, an official of the Cordillera office of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA-CAR) said here recently.
PSA-CAR regional director Villafe Alibuyog said that the estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of the region last year, however, grew at a slower pace relative to the 6.9 percent growth recorded in 2023.
She noted that the fastest growth were recorded in various industries such as professional and business services with 12.1 percent; other services with 10 percent; and human health and social work activities with 9.9 percent.
Consequently, the PSA-CAR official claimed that there were two industries that posted contractions last year, particularly, construction by 2.7 percent and mining and quarrying that continued to contract from a 1.6 percent decline in 2023 to another 2.1 percent drop last year.
According to her, the region’s economic growth was mainly driven by financial and insurance activities, contributing 1.1 percentage points to the 4.8 percent growth of the economy last year which was followed by wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles, and professional and business services with 0.9 percentage point and 0.7 percentage point contributions, respectively.
Alibuyog pointed out that the regional economy continues to be services-dominated with a 69.4 percent share, followed by industry with 23.2 percent share and agriculture, forestry, and fishing with 7.4 percent share to the region’s total economy.
Ironically, Cordillera remains one of the least contributors to the 5.7 percent economic growth of the country with a mere 0.1 percentage point while the region’s economy accounted for only 1.7 percent of the national GDP, least across regions.
On the other hand, she stipulated that the per capita GRDP of the region stood at PhP201,088 last year which was 3.6 percent higher than the PhP191,036 per capita GRDP estimated in the previous year.
She explained that per capita GRDP is the total regional GDP levels divided by the total population to construe how much an individual contributes to the regional economy.
More importantly, CAR posted the second highest per capita GRDP among all regions in 2024 while the National Capital Region (NCR) had the highest with PhP503,483 per capita GRDP.
Incidentally, Cordillera’s imports of goods and services from the rest of the world further expanded from a 24 percent increase in 2023 to a 22.9 percent growth in 2024 which was the fastest growing expenditure item in the region, followed by government final consumption expenditure and household final consumption expenditure with 7.6 percent and 4 percent growths, respectively.
She revealed that the main driver of the region’s economy in terms of expenditure was housing final consumption expenditure with 3.6 percentage points.
Alibuyog added that the per capita housing final consumption expenditure of the region was estimated at PhP144,230 in 2024 which means that on the average, an individual member of a household spends PhP144,230 on final consumption of goods and services that includes purchase of consumer goods and services, barter transactions, good and services in kind, and goods and services produced and consumed by the same individual. By Dexter A. See
