Economics Perspective - Global Economic News & In-depth Analysis

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released a new report showing that the economic rise of the Philippines has continued for 15 consecutive years. The report showed the many opportunities for economic reform in order to continue this growth trend in the Philippines. The report also listed the projected GDP for the Philippines through the end of 2027. They predict that the GDP growth will be 5.1% for 2026 and 5.8% for 2027.

Recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund indicates that productivity growth could increase by almost 40 percent if the country manages to remove impediments that bar the expansion and creativity of firms. This would be economically meaningful, a boost to scale equal to adding the output of one of India's largest state economies to the national production every decade.

Over the last ten years, the World Bank has expanded its International Debt Statistics (IDS) program to cover a much larger portion of the world’s external debt, thereby increasing usability and comparability. However, consistent definitions and reporting practices must also be used in conjunction with disclosure in order to create real debt transparency.

According to IMF analysis, the stock and bond returns have been trending in the same way, mainly on acute selloffs, since early 2020. Rather than bonds covering the losses of equity, the two asset classes have sometimes declined in tandem, eliminating the diversification advantages. It seems that the shift started towards the end of 2019 and accelerated with the supply shocks prompted by the pandemic, which created global inflation. Statistics provided by the IMF indicate the presence of a structural break. In the pre-pandemic past, the correlation between equities and government bonds rolled negatively in the majority of cases. In 2020, the trend of the correlations was positive and often had a positive value.

Over two-thirds of the nations had a score of below 50, meaning they were facing serious corruption issues in huge portions of the world. Nordic and highly institutionalized democracies still dominate at the top of the index. Denmark was ranked first with a score of 89, and this has followed a long track of good performance in governance. Other advanced nations are Finland, Singapore, and New Zealand, which are known to have a good reputation in terms of good institutions and open administration. On the other extreme, the least scored are conflict-affected and politically unstable states. There were the lowest scores in such countries as Somalia and South Sudan.

Global electricity consumption is entering a period of sustained and accelerated expansion, marking what many describe as the “Age of Electricity.” Between 2026 and 2030, worldwide electricity demand is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 3.6%, significantly faster than in the previous decade. This surge is driven by rising industrial production, rapid adoption of electric vehicles, expanding use of air conditioning, and the proliferation of data centers supporting digitalization and artificial intelligence.

The World Bank Group has focused on five key industries in which there is great potential for creating employment opportunities: the energy and infrastructure sector, agriculture and agribusiness, health care, tourism, and manufacturing. Each of these sectors is interconnected with the other and supports the creation and development of many job opportunities and a broad-based development strategy. The two most important things that drive our economy are energy and the infrastructure necessary to transport energy to people so that they can be connected to the market and provide productivity to their daily lives.

In a world long dominated by the financial tides of the US dollar, a new story is unfolding, driven not by a grand, planned design but by an unexpected external force: the tariff policies of Donald Trump. Trump's renewed presidency saw him sign an executive order in early 2025, first imposing tariffs on imports from China, then escalating to a "universal" tariff on nearly all imports. But the most pointed attacks were reserved for the BRICS bloc and their partners.