The 6.4% mirage

You cannot eat a gross regional domestic product. Tell a mother in Molo or a sari-sari store owner in Jordan that Western Visayas led the entire country with a 6.4% economic expansion in 2025 — reaching a valuation of PHP 683.44 billion — and watch her stare back at her electric bill.

We spent months patting ourselves on the back for that headline number, much like we did when the region topped national charts at 9.3% growth in 2022. Yet the warning lights were already flashing inside the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) ledger: regional gross capital formation plunged 11.4% in 2025 while construction shrank 0.5%. Now comes the hangover. Regional headline inflation hit 8.4% in August 2026 — blowing past the 6.1% national average — while families in the bottom 30% income bracket are being punished by a 10.7% inflation tax driven by rice, fuel, power, and fare hikes.

People are working harder just to stay broke. Regional unemployment climbed from 3.9% to 6.3%, while underemployment nearly doubled from 17.1% in 2025 to 31.8% in April 2026 — meaning nearly one in three employed Ilonggos and Western Visayans holds a job that cannot cover a full week of rice, jeepney fares, and kilowatt-hours.

As Elaine Grace Fernandez of the Department of Economy, Planning, and Development (DEPDev-6) put it: “Higher spending on necessities leaves households less for other purchases. Higher business costs may also affect expansion and investment, weakening demand and employment.”

Our neighborhood businesses are bleeding from the exact same wound. In a Department of Trade and Industry (DTI-6) survey of 611 firms — 86% of them microenterprises with one to nine workers and razor-thin cash buffers — 58.8% raised prices just to survive runaway fuel costs, 49% cut production, 28% slashed working hours, 15% laid off staff, and 6% shut their doors.

Nearly four in ten — 38.8% — doubt they can stay open over the next six to 12 months. DTI-6’s Jazer P. Miranda captured the consumer-business death spiral plainly: “About 60.9% of respondents reported [a] slight to significant sales decline, which indicates that firms are being squeezed from both sides: higher expenses and weaker revenue.”

Here is the most damning number in the entire DTI-6 survey: only 14% of surveyed MSMEs have accessed government assistance. Fourteen percent. Where are DTI-6, DEPDev-6, the Department of Energy, and our local government units (LGUs)?

When 58% of surveyed small businesses report severe or high impacts from oil and logistics shocks but 86% are locked out of state relief, our safety net is not a net — it is a bureaucratic obstacle course.

State banks and LGUs must replace high-barrier loan applications with fast-tracked micro-grants, zero-interest emergency credit lines, and temporary local tax deferrals.

Geography is punishing our periphery while urban service hubs coast. Services account for PHP 454.19 billionof regional output — anchored heavily in Iloilo and Iloilo City — while transport and delivery costs cited by 510 of 611 surveyed firms strangle our island and coastal producers.

It is no accident that fuel shocks hit Guimaras (71.3% severely affected) and Antique (65.8%) the hardest.

Without direct fuel and inter-island freight subsidies, cold-storage support for food processors, and accelerated farm-to-market infrastructure, paghimakas alone will not keep the corner tiendahan alive, and the next time economic planners brag about a regional boom, nobody outside the air-conditioned conference room will buy it.