Philippines vs. Vietnam: Slow and Steady Wins the Race

For the past three decades, the Philippines has grown steadily in the Human Development Index (HDI). Landing an HDI score of 0.718 in 2019, the country has managed to jump up 3 ranks from 2014 and is ahead of other developing countries, who altogether make up an average of 0.689. That being said, the country still trails behind the pack, particularly in the East Asia and the Pacific (EA&P) region which holds an average of 0.747, as well as in its own development group. Under the high human development category, the PH falls below an even higher average of 0.753, albeit it is notable that the score differential is within two-digits.

On a lighter note, the average annual growth rate of the Philippines from 2010-2019 is 0.76, much higher than the world’s average growth at 0.59 within the same timespan. With the trajectory that the nation’s HDI is at, we can expect the country to soon overtake the world growth by the next decade or two, holding other things constant. Being a strong contender in the EA&P region is still a long reach, but we can see that the trend for the Southeast nation is to keep growing at a slow but steady pace.

Facing the numbers, we can’t deny that the Philippines is developing, but with the pace that it’s at, it’s hard to decipher if the country’s truly progressing.

With this in mind, we take a deep dive into the dimensions of human development for the Philippines while benchmarking Vietnam¹ to assess the development of the former. In terms of all three dimensions, the Philippines dominates over Viet Nam except for life expectancy (see Figure 1.A), which may be due to lifestyle habits. Despite having a slightly higher population, the Gross National Income (GNI) per capita of the Philippines is also much higher than Vietnam’s by 24% (Figure 1.B). However, we see that in Figure 2 Viet Nam has flourished beginning 1990 and has since caught up closely with the Philippines, possibly overtaking the latter in the near decade.

Still, the Philippines however has paled in comparison for the past recent decades (1990-2019) with a lower growth rate of 0.66, overthrowing Vietnam whose trendline flattened by a smaller percentage.

Overall, comparisons with Vietnam shows that the performance of the Philippines in the recent decade is good, but holding other things constant, it is forecasted to continue improving at a steady upward growth side-by-side with Vietnam.

Note:

Vietnam is part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) along with the Philippines, and has the closest population to the latter. In 2019, Vietnam had 96.5 million people while the Philippines had 108.1 million.