Dr. Justine Diokno-Sicat was a member of the Board of Directors of the Asian Development Bank representing the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mongolia, Pakistan and Timor-Leste. As the former Executive Director she was the Chair of the Development Effectiveness Committee. Before joining ADB, she was a Research Fellow at the Philippine government policy think tank Philippine Institute for Development Studies. She has a Ph.D. in Business Administration, Ph.D. in Economics candidacy, an M.S. Management and M.A. and B.S. Economics all from the University of the Philippines. Her academic and professional experience has focused on public sector economics and political economy. As a former professor at UP Diliman, she taught courses on public sector and development economics and fiscal and monetary policy. She is also an international consultant in areas of public expenditures and financial management at national and local government levels.
This seminar examines how recent fiscal and governance reforms are reshaping decentralization in the Philippines, with a focus on local fiscal autonomy and regional inequality.
Venue
The dialogues in the series will be held in hybrid mode, i.e. in-person on the ANU Campus, and virtually on zoom.
IN-PERSON: Regional Institutes Boardroom, HC Coombs Extension Building 8, 9 Fellows Road, ANU
ONLINE: Zoom. Please select the relevant ticket, in-person or online, according to your preferred attendance mode.
Beyond the Horizon of Devolution: Navigating the 'Next Mile' of Philippine Decentralisation
After more than thirty years of decentralised governance under the Local Government Code of 1991, the subnational landscape of the Philippines has reached a critical structural turning point. While historical policies succeeded in expanding local revenue and expenditure authority including basic service delivery, there was uneven subnational development. Poorer jurisdictions—particularly those frequently exposed to compounding climate and natural disaster shocks—have consistently lagged behind on governance primarily due to geographical conditions and subnational fiscal capacity constraints.
This research directly builds upon a foundational practitioner-scholar narrative previously presented at the ANU, which identified persistent vertical fiscal imbalances, local revenue mobilization disincentives, and systemic capacity gaps in subnational investment programming. Moving beyond historical diagnoses, this paper utilizes updated subnational fiscal data (2009–2024) to estimate a contemporary iteration of the Philippine Decentralization Index based on the Bahl and Bird (2018) framework. This index captures the degree of expenditure discretion available to local chief executives and serves as a practical measure of local fiscal autonomy and development decision-making.
Crucially, this study examines the early structural impacts of major recent legislative interventions designed to reshape subnational financial architecture. These include the broadening of the intergovernmental fiscal transfer base, Republic Act No. 11964 (the Automatic Income Classification of LGUs Act), and macro-reforms depolitizing the schedule of market values for real property taxation. Ultimately, this paper outlines actionable recommendations to enhance local revenue mobilization, streamline border-spanning public goods through Regional Development Councils, and optimize targeted redistributive mechanisms like the Growth Equity Fund. The findings provide an empirical guide for multilateral institutions and national governments striving to achieve agile, inclusive, and evidence-based development in an era of accelerating global shocks.
The ANU Philippines Institute Research Seminar Series is a recurring seminar series that showcases the work of scholars working on political, social and cultural issues in the Philippines and the wider region, with the goal of encouraging greater exchange, collaboration and networking amongst the research community.
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PHOTO CREDIT: Glendale Lapastora (1) from Flickr licensed under CC BY S.A-2.0
About the Speaker
