PISA 2025 and the 2026 Global Innovation Index arrived three weeks apart. Read together, they point at a number the Philippines has never measured.

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52ndGII 2026 rank · from 50th
100thHuman capital and research · from 90th
15thCreative goods exports
63rdIndustrial designs by origin

In September the Philippines received two report cards, three weeks apart. The first, PISA 2025, said that our 15-year-olds read, calculate and reason better than they did three years ago. That is true, and the teachers responsible deserve the credit. The second, the 2026 Global Innovation Index, moved the country down two places, to 52nd of 139, short of the government’s target of 49th.1

Two places is inside the index’s margin of error. The movement underneath is not. Our innovation inputs fell from 59th to 69th in one year, while our outputs held at 49th. The pillar that measures human capital and research fell from 90th to 100th.2

The overperformer label

WIPO again finds that the Philippines performs above expectations for its level of development. The finding is accurate. It is also easy to misread.3

Outputs that outrun inputs have to come from somewhere, so it is worth looking at what the outputs are made of before taking comfort in the ratio. High-tech exports are a quarter of Philippine trade, fourth in the world, and high-tech imports are more than a fifth, sixth in the world. Parts come in. Products go out. Meanwhile the country earns almost nothing from licensing its ideas abroad: intellectual-property receipts are 0.02 per cent of trade, 100th in the world, and scientific and technical articles rank 133rd of 139.4

Flow is what crosses the border. Stock is what the country owns after the shipment has gone.

WIPO puts the point in more careful language. Writing about the Philippines and Viet Nam, it says their international production strengths still exceed their domestic capacity to generate knowledge and invent. An economy can look inventive in the trade statistics while most of the invention happens somewhere else. That is the difference between flow and stock. Flow is what crosses the border. Stock is what the country owns after the shipment has gone.5

The number nobody has

The sharpest form of the problem sits in creative goods. In the same WIPO profile, the Philippines ranks 15th in the world for creative goods exports as a share of trade, and 63rd for industrial designs filed by its own residents, measured against the size of the economy. Forty-eight places separate what we ship as creative goods from the designs we file as our own.6

Two explanations fit those numbers, and they call for opposite remedies. Filipino firms may originate designs and not register them. That is a failure to capture intellectual property, and the remedy is filing. Or much of what we export may be designed abroad and made here to a buyer’s specification, in which case the problem is origination, the remedy is capability, and more filings at the intellectual property office would change nothing. Note what 63rd does not show. It counts filings, not creativity, and it is no evidence that Filipino firms do not design.

Nobody can yet say which explanation is right, because no official statistic measures it. The Philippine Statistics Authority began its Creative Economy Satellite Accounts in 2022 as a pilot on an interim methodology, and its preliminary estimate puts the creative economy at ₱2.12 trillion in 2025, 7.6 per cent of GDP. Like satellite accounts elsewhere, they measure the value creative industries add. They do not record whose design the goods carry.7

What we are building

The Likhaan Origination Programme, in active development, exists to answer one question: what share of Philippine creative goods exports carries Filipino-originated design? Its centrepiece is the proposed Philippine Design Origination Index, an annual measure of that share by creative domain and by region.

We intend to publish the method in full, free of charge, before the first survey goes out. That gives away the most valuable thing in the programme, and we mean to. A private company that sells a government its own national statistic does not get adopted. It gets doubted, and in time replaced. An open method gets argued with, corrected and then used. Adoption is the asset.

The division of labour is simple. The Likhaan Institute of Creatology & Innovation will hold and operate the index and its method, and Likhaan Agglomerates will have no role in producing the estimate. Likhaan Agglomerates will earn its return on what comes after measurement: firm-level diagnostics for exporters, industry associations, banks and development lenders, and capability programmes that help firms move from executing other people’s designs to selling their own.

What could go wrong

Two risks deserve plain statement.

The answer may undercut the premise. If the index finds that most Philippine creative exports are already Filipino-designed, the remedy is filing rather than capability, and some of our planned programmes will matter less. We will publish that result as readily as the other one.

Measuring design origin is hard. Firms may not know, or may not say, whose drawings they work from. A method has to survive that, and the only test we trust is other people trying to break it, which is why ours will be public, instrument and estimation procedure included, before it is used on a single firm.

Why the classroom belongs in an export story

Designs are originated by people, and people are formed in schools. In 2025 almost no Filipino 15-year-olds reached PISA’s two highest proficiency levels. The OECD puts the share in science at 0.2 per cent, and press accounts of the national results put it at 0.3 per cent. Either way it is a few thousand students in a cohort of 1.75 million. That is rough arithmetic, not a finding. It still describes the pool from which the country’s designers, engineers and researchers will be drawn a decade from now. Creative thinking was last measured in 2022, when Filipino students scored 14 out of 60.8

Senator Joel Villanueva told the Senate that the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, citing Stanford researchers, put the long-run gain from bringing every Filipino 15-year-old to PISA’s baseline at around US$14 trillion over their working lives. A number that size is a direction, not a forecast. The value of raising origination has no estimate at all, because the base figure does not exist.9

The comparisons also get harder from here. WIPO’s 2026 ranking used last year’s income classification. Since July the World Bank has classed the Philippines as upper-middle-income, so later editions will set the country beside economies such as China, 10th this year, Viet Nam, 43rd, and Türkiye, 45th.10

The scores went up and the rank went down in the same month, and both were telling the truth. Neither measured the thing that decides who keeps the value, which is whose design is in the product. We intend to count it, to publish how we count it, and to let anyone check the work.

Figures are from WIPO’s Global Innovation Index 2026 economy profile of the Philippines, the OECD’s PISA 2025 and 2022 releases, the World Bank’s July 2026 income classification and the Philippine Statistics Authority.

Notes

  1. 1OECD, PISA 2025 Results (Volume I); WIPO, Global Innovation Index 2026, economy profile: Philippines. The Manila Times, 1 October 2026.
  2. 2WIPO, Global Innovation Index 2026, economy profile: Philippines.
  3. 3WIPO, Global Innovation Index 2026, economy profile: Philippines.
  4. 4WIPO, Global Innovation Index 2026, economy profile: Philippines.
  5. 5The Manila Times, 1 October 2026, quoting WIPO.
  6. 6WIPO, Global Innovation Index 2026, economy profile: Philippines. WIPO, IP Facts and Figures 2024: design counts by origin are designs contained in applications filed.
  7. 7Philippine Statistics Authority, technical notes on the Creative Economy Satellite Accounts; preliminary 2025 estimates as reported by Philstar.com, 22 March 2026, and Newsbytes.PH, 23 March 2026.
  8. 8OECD, Education GPS, Philippines country profile; Philstar.com, 8 September 2026; OECD, PISA 2022 Results (Volume III). The cohort arithmetic is ours.
  9. 9People’s Journal, 10 September 2026. The underlying OECD or Stanford calculation could not be traced.
  10. 10World Bank, FY27 country income classification; The Manila Times, 1 October 2026.

Sources

  1. 1WIPO (2026). Global Innovation Index 2026, economy profile: Philippines. https://www.wipo.int/edocs/gii-ranking/2026/ph.pdf
  2. 2The Manila Times (1 October 2026). Global innovation goal missed. https://www.manilatimes.net/2026/10/01/business/top-business/global-innovation-goal-missed/2436453
  3. 3OECD (2026). PISA 2025 Results (Volume I), country note: Philippines. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i-country-notes_2d4ff9ea-en/philippines_3699b9d5-en.html
  4. 4OECD (2026). Education GPS, Philippines country profile: student performance, PISA 2025. https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=PHL&treshold=5&topic=PI
  5. 5Philstar.com (8 September 2026). PISA 2025: Philippines breaks out of bottom 10, sees best lift in reading. https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2026/09/08/2554872/pisa-2025-philippines-breaks-out-bottom-10-sees-best-lift-reading
  6. 6Philstar.com (19 June 2024). Philippines ranks at the bottom of new PISA test on creative thinking. https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2024/06/19/2364001/philippines-ranks-bottom-new-pisa-test-creative-thinking
  7. 7People’s Journal (September 2026). From dead last in reading to fastest-improving; US$14-T potential economic payoff, Villanueva. https://journalnews.com.ph/?p=399732
  8. 8Philippine Statistics Authority. Technical notes, Philippine Creative Economy Satellite Accounts. https://psa.gov.ph/statistics/technical-notes/1684041755
  9. 9Philstar.com (22 March 2026). Creative economy valued at P2.12 trillion in 2025. https://www.philstar.com/business/2026/03/22/2515910/creative-economy-valued-p212-trillion-2025
  10. 10Newsbytes.PH (23 March 2026). PH creative economy climbs to P2.12T in 2025 on digital growth. https://newsbytes.ph/2026/03/23/ph-creative-economy-climbs-to-p2-12t-in-2025-on-digital-growth/
  11. 11Asia News Network (2 July 2026). Philippines attains upper middle income rank: World Bank. https://asianews.network/?p=284616
  12. 12World Bank (July 2026). FY27 updated country income classification. Six economies changed group; Türkiye remains upper-middle-income. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099063026190549947/pdf/BOSIB-8ff63426-3c40-412d-bad2-cc20a4ebea81.pdf
  13. 13WIPO (2024). IP Facts and Figures 2024: industrial designs. Design counts by origin are designs contained in applications filed. https://www.wipo.int/web-publications/ip-facts-and-figures-2024/en/industrial-designs.html

Creation as discipline · Innovation as practice