The national government’s debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio eased to 61 percent as of end-June versus its year ago level, data released by the Bureau of the Treasury (BTr) showed.
According to the latest debt indicators, the debt-to-GDP as of June 2023 improved from the 62.1 percent level in the same period a year ago.
It is also the same as the debt-to-GDP ratio as of end-March 2023.
In 2022, the national government’ debt-to-GDP was 60.9 percent.
The Philippine Statistics Authority reported yesterday the country’s economic growth slowed down to 4.3 percent in the second quarter, bringing the first semester average growth to 5.3 percent.
The government’s Medium-Term Fiscal Framework (MTFF) aims to bring down the debt-to-GDP ratio to less than 60 percent by 2025 then further down to 51.1 percent in 2028.
Earlier this month, the BTr reported that the national government’s outstanding debt as of end-June 2023 stood at P14.15 trillion.
Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno previously said he considers the public debt to still be “manageable.”
“The right metric is public debt as a percent of the GDP and ours is in the neighborhood of 60 to 61 percent. That’s not bad compared to most other countries, especially after the pandemic. I would calculate that, given the pandemic, I think the reasonable debt-to-GDP ratio should be around 70 percent… and in fact in our MTFF, our target debt-to-GDP ratio last year was around 62.3 percent, and it was much lower than that. So we’re on track,” Diokno earlier said.
“It also matters how the debt is used. It makes a lot of difference if the debt is used for public capital investment and productivity enhancing measures rather than government consumption,” he also added.
