A national budget is more than an accounting document. It is a theory of development expressed in pesos.

Every appropriation makes an implicit argument about how a country moves forward. A bridge assumes that connectivity will create economic opportunity. A classroom assumes that education will improve human capability. A feeding program recognizes that a hungry child cannot learn effectively. Health spending acknowledges that illness can wipe out years of household progress. And money spent on procurement, auditing and public information reflects another basic truth: development requires institutions capable of turning appropriations into actual public value.

This is the proper way to read the proposed ₱7.2-trillion national budget for 2027.

The debate should not be reduced to the familiar question of which department gained billions and which one lost them. Nor should it become another sterile argument between infrastructure and social spending.

The Philippines needs both.

What matters is whether they work together.

The case for infrastructure is real

There is a strong developmental argument for the infrastructure push in the FY2027 budget.

The government’s Build Better More infrastructure program is proposed at roughly ₱1.467 trillion, equivalent to about 4.4 percent of GDP. The increase in the Department of Public Works and Highways is also more complex than the headline numbers suggest.

A considerable portion of the increase appears to come from major strategic and foreign-assisted projects rather than simply another indiscriminate expansion of localized public works.

That distinction matters.

Good infrastructure can lower logistics costs, connect workers to jobs, integrate markets, protect communities from flooding and disasters, and make regions more attractive to investment. In an archipelagic country where geography itself imposes enormous economic costs, roads, bridges, ports, mass transportation and other forms of connectivity are not luxuries.

But infrastructure should be judged by what it makes possible, not by how much concrete is poured.

The meaningful question is not how many kilometers of road were built but how much travel time was saved, how many producers reached larger markets, how much disaster damage was prevented, how many jobs became accessible, and how much additional productive investment was generated.

A project that looks impressive but produces little economic or social return remains an expensive monument.

Look beneath the education headline

This is where the budget’s internal composition becomes important.

Education remains one of the largest commitments of the Philippine government. But a large education budget by itself does not guarantee better learning.

Our comparison of the FY2026 General Appropriations Act with the proposed FY2027 National Expenditure Program reveals significant pressure on several complementary educational inputs.

Among the screening figures are substantial reductions in appropriations for basic education facilities, textbooks and instructional materials, computerization, school-based feeding, and human resource development.

These numbers require caution. A lower appropriation does not automatically mean neglect. Some FY2026 expenditures may have been extraordinary catch-up investments. Projects may continue into the following year. Procurement savings, program restructuring or transfers to other funding sources may explain part of the difference.

But these reductions warrant explanation, as the country’s educational problems have not disappeared.

Teachers cannot produce learning through salaries alone.

A well-paid teacher still needs classrooms that are not severely overcrowded, textbooks that arrive on time, functioning technology, adequate connectivity and pupils healthy enough to learn.

Education is produced by a system of complementary inputs.

When one part weakens, the return on the others can also decline.

Congress should therefore ask a more meaningful question than whether education once again receives the biggest departmental allocation:

What learning does every additional peso actually produce?

Human capital is economic infrastructure too

The same principle applies to health and nutrition.

We sometimes treat them as social expenditures while roads, ports and power systems are described as economic expenditures.

That distinction is misleading.

A healthy worker is productive infrastructure.

A well-nourished child is future productive capacity.

A literate population is an economic asset.

Physical capital expands the possibility of production. Human capital determines how much of that possibility a society can actually exploit.

The Philippines cannot credibly aspire to become a major center for semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, digital services, sophisticated logistics and other high-value industries while neglecting foundational learning, child nutrition and public health.

We risk building a twenty-first-century physical economy around a workforce whose capabilities have not kept pace.Nutrition deserves particular attention because its effects begin even before formal schooling.A child who suffers severe nutritional deprivation during the critical early years may enter a classroom already carrying developmental disadvantages that additional schooling cannot easily reverse. Nutrition, therefore, is not merely welfare.It is part of the production function of education. Social protection should be an escalator

The FY2027 budget also suggests a restructuring of social protection.Programs such as the 4Ps remain substantial. Social pensions are largely protected, livelihood interventions continue, and new or expanded resilience and food-security programs appear alongside reductions in some recurring assistance programs.Such restructuring can be defensible.But government must demonstrate that reductions reflect declining vulnerability, greater efficiency or successful graduation—not merely shrinking expenditure.The success of social protection should not be measured only by how many people receive assistance.We should ask what happens after assistance.

Did families graduate sustainably from poverty? Did their children become healthier and better educated? Did livelihood projects survive? Did households remain above the poverty threshold after leaving a program? Did they return to poverty after the next typhoon, illness or unemployment shock?

Social protection should not become a waiting room in which poor families remain indefinitely.It should function as an escalator: from protection to capability, from capability to opportunity, and from opportunity to sustainable income.The political economy of concrete.

There is another reason infrastructure tends to dominate political imagination. Concrete is visible.A bridge can be inaugurated. A road can be photographed. A floodwall can carry a politician’s name on a project marker. The cognitive development of a child cannot. The family that avoids bankruptcy because health financing worked does not produce a monument. Neither does the civil servant who prevents an overpriced procurement.

This creates what I call a visibility premium in democratic budgeting. Political systems naturally reward projects whose benefits can be photographed more readily than improvements whose effects emerge slowly through healthier children, better learning, stronger institutions, and lower household vulnerability. The answer is not to demonize infrastructure. The Philippines needs much more of it. The answer is to make sure that what is politically visible does not crowd out what is developmentally indispensable. Governance is also development.

Finally, there is the question of how government actually converts money into results. Governance should not be treated as an afterthought to development. It is a multiplier of development spending. Two governments can spend exactly the same amount on infrastructure, health or education and produce radically different outcomes. One may select projects carefully, procure competitively, implement on time and disclose its records.

Another may tolerate poor project selection, delays, cost escalation and weak accountability. The fiscal input may be identical. The developmental output will not be. Our examination of selected DPWH flood-control appropriations illustrates the problem. Detailed project books now permit considerable scrutiny, including locations and engineering chainages. That is progress. But following one infrastructure project seamlessly from its original appropriation through procurement, implementation, payments, succeeding appropriations and eventual physical completion can still require considerable detective work. It should not.

Every major publicly funded infrastructure project should have a permanent digital identity and a publicly accessible lifecycle record: its location, engineering scope, annual appropriations, contractor, contract value, variation orders, physical accomplishment, payments and completed output. If a later appropriation extends an existing project, the public should be able to see that immediately.

Transparency would protect honest agencies as much as it would expose questionable transactions. What Congress should do: The task during congressional budget deliberations should therefore not be to dismantle the infrastructure program or simply restore every reduction mechanically. It should be to strengthen the developmental coherence of the budget.

Government should explain major reductions in education, health and nutrition inputs in terms of actual outcomes. Congress should assess education spending against learning productivity rather than headline appropriations. Health policy should measure whether illness continues to impoverish families. Social protection should be evaluated based on sustainable mobility rather than on caseload alone. And DBM should eventually institutionalize a Developmental Balance Statement that shows how each proposed national budget allocates its marginal resources among physical capital, human capital, social protection, resilience, institutional capacity, and mandatory expenditures. That would tell us far more about government priorities than departmental rankings alone.

Beyond concrete, the proposed FY2027 budget contains many elements of a developmental budget. Its infrastructure program is substantial and potentially transformative. Its social commitments remain enormous. Its direction cannot fairly be described as simply abandoning people in favor of concrete. But neither should a ₱7.2-trillion headline reassure us by itself.The real test is whether the different pieces connect.

Infrastructure must create productive opportunity. Education, health and nutrition must create human capability. Social protection must preserve that capability when households encounter shocks and help people move toward sustainable livelihoods.

And institutions governed by predictable rules must ensure that every peso allocated to these purposes reaches its intended public value. A bridge can connect two shores. A truly developmental budget must accomplish something harder: connect public expenditure to human capability, capability to opportunity, opportunity to mobility, and state power to public trust.

Only when those connections hold does government spending become development.Only then does concrete become more than concrete.

Louie Checa Montemar is an Associate Professor of Social Sciences and Development at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines and a development sociologist and policy researcher. This article draws from his working paper, “Beyond Concrete: A Developmental Assessment of the Proposed FY2027 Philippine National Budget Through Human Capability, Productive Opportunity, Social Protection, and the Rule of Law.”