BAGUIO CITY – The Cordillera office of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA-CAR) said the region’s economy increased from an estimated P134 billion in 2015 in 2015 to P137 billion last year in constant prices that correspond to an economic growth of 2.1 percent which is slightly lower than the 4 percent economic growth two years ago.
Villafe P. Alibuyug, PSA-CAR regional director, said the slowdown in the region’s economic growth last year was due to the decline in agriculture, hunting, forestry and fishing (AHFF) and industry.
She explained industry accounted for half of the region’s total output at 49.4 percent, followed by services at 41.7 percent and AHFF at 8.8 percent.
“The percent share of services to the total output of the region increased while the shares of industry and AHFF decreased. Industry posted a decrease of 0.2 percent last year from a positive 3.5 percent in 2015 brought about by the negative growths of construction and mining and quarrying that declined 25.4 and 3.5 percent, respectively,” Alibuyug stressed.
Further, manufacturing, the industry’s biggest contributor, managed to grow but on a slower pace from 4.4 percent in 2015 to only 3.8 percent last year.
On the other hand, she claimed electricity, gas and water supply (EGWS) rebounded from negative growth of 8.6 percent in 2015 to positive 13.4 percent last year.
However, services decelerated from 6.8 percent in 2015 to 6.5 percent last year while real estate, renting and business activities (RERBA) slowed down from 6.6 percent in 2015 to 3.1 percent last year.
The PSA-CAR official noted the other sub-industries that decelerated were transportation, storage, and communication, from 7.0 percent in 2015 to 5.3 percent last year and trade from 7.2 percent two years ago to 7.1 percent last year.
Meanwhile, Alibuyug emphasized public administration and defense (PAD) accelerated the fastest from 1.3 percent in 2015 to 5.3 last year followed by financial intermediation from 6.0 percent two years ago to 8.7 percent last year and other services from 9.0 percent in 2015 to 9.6 percent last year.
According to her, the bulk of services and RERBA account for 11.7 percent and 10.4 percent shares of the regional output, respectively.
She added other services include education, health and social work, hotels and restaurants and sewerage, recreation and other services.
In a related development, she emphasized AHFF contracted further from negative 4.1 percent in 2015 to negative 4.5 percent last year and the decline was due to the negative growth of the agriculture and forestry sub-industries which further contracted by 4.7 percent last year.
She revealed services contributed most to the region’s overall growth rate at 2.6 percentage points but AHFF pulled down the region’s growth rate by 0.4 percentage points and industry by 0.1 percentage points.
Jadedea Aquino, assistant regional director of the Cordillera office of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA-CAR), said the region’s slow growth rate only means that there is a need to expand to other growth areas that will contribute to increasing the growth rate in the future. By HENT
