The Cebu-led Central Visayas economic performance

With almost 70 percent of the Central Visayas Gross Domestic Product (GDP) coming from Cebu, it is safe to say that the region’s economic growth is Cebu-led.

Last year, the Central Visayas GDP increased in real terms by 5.1 percent from it’s 2016 level. This was lower, however, than the 8.6 percent growth it achieved in the previous year. Last year’s slowdown was due mainly to the decline in industry sector growth from 14.1 percent in 2016 to 3.0 percent in 2017. Industry accounts for 38.2 percent of the GDP of the region.

Within industry, the region’s construction subsector grew by 38.3 percent in 2016 but it went down by 0.9 percent in 2017. Mining and quarrying also went down 5.5 percent in 2017 from positive one percent in 2016. The decline in construction and mining and quarrying was also shared by electricity, gas, and water supply when it’s 7.0 percent growth in 2016 became negative 0.9 percent in the following year. Within the industry sector, only manufacturing managed to grow by 5.5 percent in 2017. This was lower though than the 6.0 percent growth it achieved in the previous year.
From negative 0.2 percent in 2016, agriculture which accounts for only 5.5 percent of the regional GDP grew by 7.0 in 2017. Services which accounts for 56 percent of the regional GDP grew by 6.3 percent in the same year, up from 6.0 percent in 2016.

Overall, from 2009 to 2017, the Central Visayas GDP at constant 2000 prices grew in average at 7.8 percent annually. During this period, the region tied up with Central Luzon as the fastest growing region in the country. In the same period, the national economy grew only by 6.4 annually. This gives the Central Visayas a growth elasticity of 1.22. It means that for every one percent growth in national output, the region responds by growing at 1.22 percent or by 0.22 percent more than the national economy.

Of the three major sectors, industry was the fastest growing in the region in the last eight years which at 9.98 percent annually exceeded the 7.39 percent annual growth rate of the entire country’s industry sector. In the same period, the region’s service industry also grew faster at 7.3 percent annually than the entire country’s service sector which grew only by 6.69 percent annually. The region’s agriculture grew slowly by 1.49 percent from 2009 to 2017 but even this was still higher than the 1.35 percent national annual growth rate in agriculture in the same period.

As a result of it’s rapid growth, the share of the industry sector increased to 38.2 percent of the region’s GDP in 2017 from only 32.6 percent in 2009. This came at the expense of the share of agriculture which decreased from in 8.9 percent in 2009 to 5.5 percent in 2017 and services which also decreased from 58.5 percent in 2009 to 56.3 percent in 2017.

Dividing the percentage share of output by sector in the region with the percentage share of output by sector at the national level gives us the region’s location quotient or intensity of development by industry. In 2017 the industry sector in the region was already more intensively developed with respect to the whole country with 1.12 in location quotient, up from 1.03 in 2009. This is the result of the more rapid growth of the industry sector in the region compared with that of the whole country in the last eight years.