Benedict Maravilla

The national government’s outstanding debt under the Marcos administration has recorded a 30-percent increase from the previous presidency, totalling to an amount of 16.63 trillion pesos, a group reported.

Photo Courtesy of The ASEAN Post.

In a statistics released by IBON Foundation on April 2, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration, after just almost three years in his term, has already borrowed about 3.84 trillion pesos as of Feb. 2025, adding to the 12.79 trillion pesos that the Duterte administration had left in Marcos’ hands.

Among the sources of the recorded debt, 67.5 percent came from within the Philippines; 32.5 percent came from external entities of which 79.5% was lended by the United States of America; 9.9% from the European Union; and 9.0% from Japan.

The organization presented that when divided per family, the national debt will be 609,212 pesos; for every Filipino individual, the debt will be 147,653 pesos.

The Marcos administration also has the highest average monthly increase in outstanding debt at 120 billion pesos for the past four presidential terms.

Under Marcos Jr.’s term, the monthly debt increase was recorded to be 1.14 billion more than that of Duterte’s which was logged to have 95.1 billion pesos.

The said monthly borrowing is at least six-fold compared to the Aquino and the Arroyo administrations which only had 19 billion peso and 21.2 billion peso worth of debt respectively.

Despite economic recoveries under his term, the national debt still remains at a high value.