Philippines lags behind peers in basic education spending

MANILA, Philippines — The basic education spending levels in the Philippines continue to fall behind in the region, contributing to the country’s poor performance in international standardized student assessments.

In a recent study, state-run think tank Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) said public spending per student in the primary and secondary education levels lags behind those of other countries in Asia Pacific.

This even as total education expenditures in the country had increased by 6.4 percent annually over the past 15 years.

“The Philippines spends only about 60 and 72 percent of Indonesia’s per-student public spending for primary and secondary levels, respectively, despite the country’s per capita income being 84 percent of Indonesia,” PIDS senior research fellow Michael Abrigo said.

Education spending as a share of the country’s gross domestic product also increased from 5.8 percent in 2005 to 7.5 percent in 2019.

The public sector spending on education likewise improved from 2.1 percent in 2005 to 3.1 percent of GDP in 2019.

Abrigo, however, emphasized that greater education spending does not automatically lead to better schooling outcomes and greater resources may be needed to raise schooling quality, especially in resource-poor settings.

The PIDS researcher noted that increasing resources may be “difficult to achieve as per capita education spending is intimately linked with a country’s economic development and fertility levels.”

“The government might consider improving schooling quality by optimizing the translation of inputs to outputs,” Abrigo said.

“Raising education spending per capita may therefore entail more than rallying resources for the education sector but also ensuring that robust economic opportunities are available to improve average household incomes, as well as assisting households to achieve their desired fertility levels,” he said.

The PIDS study used the recent National Transfer Account estimates for the Philippines and countries around the world to uncover and describe trends in global education financing.