Fastest is not biggest: Reading the 2025 Western Visayas numbers

By Francis Allan Angelo

Western Visayas grew faster than any other region in the country last year, but it remains only the eighth-largest of the 18 regional economies.

Together, these two findings from the latest PSA release paint a complete picture.

The Provincial Product Accounts published in August pegged regional economic growth at 6.38% for 2025.

National output expanded by roughly 4.4% over the same period. Western Visayas ran nearly two percentage points ahead of the national average, accelerating from its 4.4% growth in 2024.

Yet the region’s total economic weight tells a different story.

Regional output hit PHP 683.4 billion at constant 2018 prices, comprising just 2.94% of the Philippine gross domestic product.

Metro Manila, CALABARZON, and Central Luzon still dwarf it. Central Visayas, the Davao Region, and Northern Mindanao also produce far more.

The fastest-growing economy of 2025 sits near the middle of the national table, not the top. This gap between speed and weight forms the core of a recent reading of the accounts by the Institute of Contemporary Economics.

The institute rightly argued that economic size, growth, industrial structure, and national rankings must be evaluated separately, not conflated as interchangeable measures of progress.

Growth describes how fast an economy adds output, while size dictates how much output existed to begin with.

A regional economy can lead the country in speed while remaining unremarkable in sheer volume for years.

The provincial breakdowns illustrate exactly why this distinction matters.

Guimaras grew by a staggering 7.96% in 2025, adding roughly PHP 1.4 billion in real output.

Iloilo Province grew slower at 5.88% but added PHP 12.9 billion to the economy, which is nearly nine times as much.

Percentage growth on a small base and percentage growth on a large base are not comparable markers of prosperity.

The institute estimated the region’s total additional output for the year at PHP 41 billion.

Iloilo Province supplied PHP 12.9 billion of that pie, while Iloilo City added another PHP 10.4 billion.

More than half of the region’s new production came from Iloilo, even though four other local economies posted higher percentage growth rates.

Ranking provinces by growth rate alone tells readers very little about where economic activity is actually concentrated.

Still, none of this reduces the 2025 performance to a mere statistical rounding artifact.

Between 2018 and 2025, the regional economy expanded from PHP 511.7 billion to PHP 683.4 billion.

That represents a cumulative real increase of 33.6% and an average annual growth of 4.22%, a solid run that even absorbed the 2020 pandemic contraction.

The institute noted that only two of the 18 regions recorded a higher compound annual rate across those seven years.

But what the economic accounts leave out demands equal attention.

Gross domestic product counts production, not how the resulting wealth is distributed. It does not measure job security, the soaring cost of rice and electricity, or the quality of public services.

A region can grow by 6.38% while a fisherman in Estancia or a tricycle driver in Jaro feels absolutely nothing resembling a banner economic year.

Those realities require looking at the labor force survey, the family income and expenditure survey, and the consumer price index, none of which are in this GDP data dump.

Any analysis of these figures must also carry a crucial structural caveat.

Western Visayas no longer includes Negros Occidental and Bacolod City, which moved to the Negros Island Region under Republic Act No. 12000.

Present-day Region VI now solely covers Aklan, Antique, Capiz, Guimaras, and Iloilo, alongside highly urbanized Iloilo City.

Comparing a 2025 aggregate against an older Region VI total without adjusting for this geographical split will manufacture a severe economic decline that never actually happened.

Ultimately, the useful question is not whether 6.38% is impressive, but where the additional output actually originated.

The answers differ sharply across the board. Capiz surged on the back of agriculture, forestry, and fishing. Antique rode heavily on mining and quarrying, which the institute estimated comprises roughly two-fifths of the provincial economy.

Aklan slowed to 3.31%, a figure the analysis read not as weakness but as the natural end of its massive post-pandemic Boracay tourism rebound.

Iloilo City expanded broadly across trade, finance, health, education, and real estate property.

We are looking at four vastly different economies masking under one regional average.

Readers must also note that the Institute of Contemporary Economics is an independent policy group with its own development thrust, using these numbers to validate its past recommendations. That context matters, even if its baseline arithmetic checks out against the raw PSA tables.

Read carefully, the 6.38% growth is a strong result that raises far more questions than it settles. Read carelessly, it becomes nothing more than a political tarpaulin.