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Population growth and Philippine development


Rapid growth in the Philippine population poses a challenge to economic development but, at the same time, is a source of new opportunities.

The population of the Philippines has increased fourfold in the last 50 years, from about 20 million in 1050 to today’s almost 80 million Filipinos. Although the country’s population growth rate declined from 3% in the 1960s to 2.3% in the 1990s, it is still considered high compared to neighbors like Thailand (at 1.4%) and Indonesia (at 1.6%). Over 1.8 million Filipinos are born yearly. As a consequence, there are over 28 million more people today in the Philippines than in South Korea and 15 million more than in Thailand, when in 1965 these countries had about the same population size.

Mariana L. Arenas of the Knowledge Institute writes this article for the SGV Review.

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