THE PHILIPPINES remains on track to graduate to upper middle-income country (UMIC) status this year, despite a sharp growth slowdown in 2025, the Department of THE PHILIPPINES remains on track to graduate to upper middle-income country (UMIC) status this year, despite a sharp growth slowdown in 2025, the Department of

Balisacan still confident PHL can achieve upper middle-class status this year

2026/01/30 00:32
4 min read

By Aubrey Rose A. Inosante, Reporter

THE PHILIPPINES remains on track to graduate to upper middle-income country (UMIC) status this year, despite a sharp growth slowdown in 2025, the Department of Economy, Planning, and Development (DEPDev) said.

Economy Secretary Arsenio M. Balisacan said the Philippines can still achieve UMIC status this year despite the weaker-than-expected 4.4% gross domestic product (GDP) growth last year.

“We still have to redo the numbers, but with the 4.4% growth in 2025, we should still be able to reach the average income class status,” he told a briefing on Thursday.

The Philippines is still stuck in the lower middle-income bracket, having failed to advance out of it since 1987, despite posting a higher gross national income (GNI) per capita of $4,470 in 2024.

Under the World Bank’s latest country classification, the Philippines’ GNI per capita was only $26 shy of the World Bank’s adjusted GNI per capita requirement of $4,496-$13,935 for UMIC status.

The Washington-based lender is scheduled to release its updated annual country status thresholds in July.

Last year, Mr. Balisacan said the Philippines needs to sustain 6% growth from 2025 to 2026 to ensure its GNI per capita meets the UMIC threshold.

In 2025, Philippine GDP growth sharply slowed to 4.4%, from 5.7% in 2024. This was the weakest print in five years or since 2020 when GDP contracted by 9.5% amid the pandemic. Excluding the pandemic, it was the slowest growth since the 3.9% expansion in 2011. 

Mr. Balisacan said the economy’s potential growth still stands at 6%, which makes the government confident about achieving its long-term goal of building a predominantly middle-class society under AmBisyon Natin 2040.

“Actually, the investments that we are making in human capital, particularly education and health and infrastructure, these can elevate that potential to an even higher one — 6.5% or even 7%,” Mr. Balisacan said.

Analysts said the Philippines achieving UMIC status carries symbolic weight but cautioned that it is a weak measure of real development.

“Graduation to UMIC is important symbolically but its real economic value will depend on whether it comes with deeper structural shifts that raise living standards more broadly,” John Paolo R. Rivera, a senior research fellow at the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, said in a Viber message.

Even modest growth can lift per capita income if supported by stable employment, remittance inflows, and manageable inflation, Mr. Rivera added.

Jose Enrique “Sonny” A. Africa, executive director of IBON Foundation, said UMIC status is a “mere bureaucratic category” used by the World Bank to guide lending and grant-making.

“It’s an extremely poor indicator of real development because, for instance, any UMIC status the Philippines might get will be amid growing poverty, hunger, and volatile poor quality work,” he said in a Viber message.

TEMPERED TARGETS
At the same briefing, Mr. Balisacan said the Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) had tweaked the macroeconomic assumptions for foreign exchange rate and export growth, after cutting growth targets.

On external trade assumptions, the DBCC kept the goods export growth at 2% this year, unchanged from the June meeting.

It raised its goods export growth projection to 3% in 2027, from the earlier forecast of 2%.

“For the exports of services, we are assuming 5% for 2026 and the same growth for 2027,” he said.

The peso forecast range was widened to P58-P60 per dollar for 2026-2027, from the earlier projection of P56-P58 per dollar for 2025 until 2028, Mr. Balisacan said.

The peso has repeatedly breached the P59-a-dollar mark several times since November and sank to a record low of P59.46 on Jan. 15.

At its December meeting, the DBCC cut its GDP growth target to 5-6% for this year, from 6-7% previously. It set a 5.5-6.5% growth goal for 2027.

“Now, obviously, the lower growth for next year… will impact revenue collections relative to what we initially expected,” Mr. Balisacan said.

The government is targeting to collect P4.824 trillion this year, about 3.19% less than the P4.983 trillion goal set in the June 2025 meeting.

For 2027, the revenue collection target was cut by 4.55% to P5.122 trillion, while the revenue target for 2028 was also reduced by 5.86% to P5.568 trillion.

Mr. Balisacan said government efforts, particularly in light of the flood control project scandal, were focused not only on expanding expenditures but also on enhancing spending quality.

“(This will make) sure that what we spend will actually end up with better services and in the case of income transfers with the intended target groups and in many cases with low-income households,” he added.

Disclaimer: The articles reposted on this site are sourced from public platforms and are provided for informational purposes only. They do not necessarily reflect the views of MEXC. All rights remain with the original authors. If you believe any content infringes on third-party rights, please contact service@support.mexc.com for removal. MEXC makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the content and is not responsible for any actions taken based on the information provided. The content does not constitute financial, legal, or other professional advice, nor should it be considered a recommendation or endorsement by MEXC.

You May Also Like

HitPaw API is Integrated by Comfy for Professional Image and Video Enhancement to Global Creators

HitPaw API is Integrated by Comfy for Professional Image and Video Enhancement to Global Creators

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — HitPaw, a leader in AI-powered visual enhancement solutions, announced Comfy, a global content creation platform, is
Share
AI Journal2026/02/08 09:15
Journalist gives brutal review of Melania movie: 'Not a single person in the theater'

Journalist gives brutal review of Melania movie: 'Not a single person in the theater'

A Journalist gave a brutal review of the new Melania documentary, which has been criticized by those who say it won't make back the huge fees spent to make it,
Share
Rawstory2026/02/08 09:08
Facts Vs. Hype: Analyst Examines XRP Supply Shock Theory

Facts Vs. Hype: Analyst Examines XRP Supply Shock Theory

Prominent analyst Cheeky Crypto (203,000 followers on YouTube) set out to verify a fast-spreading claim that XRP’s circulating supply could “vanish overnight,” and his conclusion is more nuanced than the headline suggests: nothing in the ledger disappears, but the amount of XRP that is truly liquid could be far smaller than most dashboards imply—small enough, in his view, to set the stage for an abrupt liquidity squeeze if demand spikes. XRP Supply Shock? The video opens with the host acknowledging his own skepticism—“I woke up to a rumor that XRP supply could vanish overnight. Sounds crazy, right?”—before committing to test the thesis rather than dismiss it. He frames the exercise as an attempt to reconcile a long-standing critique (“XRP’s supply is too large for high prices”) with a rival view taking hold among prominent community voices: that much of the supply counted as “circulating” is effectively unavailable to trade. His first step is a straightforward data check. Pulling public figures, he finds CoinMarketCap showing roughly 59.6 billion XRP as circulating, while XRPScan reports about 64.7 billion. The divergence prompts what becomes the video’s key methodological point: different sources count “circulating” differently. Related Reading: Analyst Sounds Major XRP Warning: Last Chance To Get In As Accumulation Balloons As he explains it, the higher on-ledger number likely includes balances that aggregators exclude or treat as restricted, most notably Ripple’s programmatic escrow. He highlights that Ripple still “holds a chunk of XRP in escrow, about 35.3 billion XRP locked up across multiple wallets, with a nominal schedule of up to 1 billion released per month and unused portions commonly re-escrowed. Those coins exist and are accounted for on-ledger, but “they aren’t actually sitting on exchanges” and are not immediately available to buyers. In his words, “for all intents and purposes, that escrow stash is effectively off of the market.” From there, the analysis moves from headline “circulating supply” to the subtler concept of effective float. Beyond escrow, he argues that large strategic holders—banks, fintechs, or other whales—may sit on material balances without supplying order books. When you strip out escrow and these non-selling stashes, he says, “the effective circulating supply… is actually way smaller than the 59 or even 64 billion figure.” He cites community estimates in the “20 or 30 billion” range for what might be truly liquid at any given moment, while emphasizing that nobody has a precise number. That effective-float framing underpins the crux of his thesis: a potential supply shock if demand accelerates faster than fresh sell-side supply appears. “Price is a dance between supply and demand,” he says; if institutional or sovereign-scale users suddenly need XRP and “the market finds that there isn’t enough XRP readily available,” order books could thin out and prices could “shoot on up, sometimes violently.” His phrase “circulating supply could collapse overnight” is presented not as a claim that tokens are destroyed or removed from the ledger, but as a market-structure scenario in which available inventory to sell dries up quickly because holders won’t part with it. How Could The XRP Supply Shock Happen? On the demand side, he anchors the hypothetical to tokenization. He points to the “very early stages of something huge in finance”—on-chain tokenization of debt, stablecoins, CBDCs and even gold—and argues the XRP Ledger aims to be “the settlement layer” for those assets.He references Ripple CTO David Schwartz’s earlier comments about an XRPL pivot toward tokenized assets and notes that an institutional research shop (Bitwise) has framed XRP as a way to play the tokenization theme. In his construction, if “trillions of dollars in value” begin settling across XRPL rails, working inventories of XRP for bridging, liquidity and settlement could rise sharply, tightening effective float. Related Reading: XRP Bearish Signal: Whales Offload $486 Million In Asset To illustrate, he offers two analogies. First, the “concert tickets” model: you think there are 100,000 tickets (100B supply), but 50,000 are held by the promoter (escrow) and 30,000 by corporate buyers (whales), leaving only 20,000 for the public; if a million people want in, prices explode. Second, a comparison to Bitcoin’s halving: while XRP has no programmatic halving, he proposes that a sudden adoption wave could function like a de facto halving of available supply—“XRP’s version of a halving could actually be the adoption event.” He also updates the narrative context that long dogged XRP. Once derided for “too much supply,” he argues the script has “totally flipped.” He cites the current cycle’s optics—“XRP is sitting above $3 with a market cap north of around $180 billion”—as evidence that raw supply counts did not cap price as tightly as critics claimed, and as a backdrop for why a scarcity narrative is gaining traction. Still, he declines to publish targets or timelines, repeatedly stressing uncertainty and risk. “I’m not a financial adviser… cryptocurrencies are highly volatile,” he reminds viewers, adding that tokenization could take off “on some other platform,” unfold more slowly than enthusiasts expect, or fail to get to “sudden shock” scale. The verdict he offers is deliberately bound. The theory that “XRP supply could vanish overnight” is imprecise on its face; the ledger will not erase coins. But after examining dashboard methodologies, escrow mechanics and the behavior of large holders, he concludes that the effective float could be meaningfully smaller than headline supply figures, and that a fast-developing tokenization use case could, under the right conditions, stress that float. “Overnight is a dramatic way to put it,” he concedes. “The change could actually be very sudden when it comes.” At press time, XRP traded at $3.0198. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
Share
NewsBTC2025/09/18 11:00