Further From Ourselves Than From Singapore

I set out to rank Philippine cities by how business-friendly they are. I could not do it, so I did something smaller and true instead.

Why The Original Plan Died

The government keeps a list. It scores 149 cities and over a thousand towns on things like local government efficiency and infrastructure. It is a good list.

I tried to download it. The website said no. Not "broken" — it just refuses programs and only answers people clicking in a browser.

The old version of this page had all 149 city scores on it anyway. It should not have. Nobody had ever opened that list.

So I picked a different question. One I can actually answer, and check.

How Well Do Things Move?

The World Bank asks shipping companies to score countries on moving goods. Six things, each out of 5. Customs. Roads and ports. Shipping prices. Skill of local firms. Tracking. Arriving on time.

Here is ours, worst to best.

Customs: 2.8. Then international shipments 3.1, infrastructure 3.2, tracking 3.3, local skill 3.3. And at the top, arriving on time: 3.9.

Look at the shape of that. It is not a country that is a bit behind at everything. It is a country that is fine at most of it and stuck at one point.

Your box arrives on the right day. Then it sits at the border.

The Comparison That Made It Click

Overall we score 3.3. Singapore, the best in our neighbourhood, scores 4.3. So we are 1.0 behind the top.

Now look back at our own numbers. Our best is 3.9 and our worst is 2.8. That is a gap of 1.1 inside our own country.

We are further from ourselves than we are from the leader.

And on customs alone, Singapore is 1.4 ahead of us. That is the widest single gap between any two of these countries on any one thing.

That is a useful kind of finding. It does not say "do better". It points at one door.

Are We Getting Better?

Yes, slowly. We went from 2.69 in 2007 to 3.3 now. That is 0.61 up.

But our place in line barely moved. We have sat between 4th and 6th out of 6 the whole time.

Everyone got better together. Running faster does not move you up if the whole race speeds up.

What This Number Is Not

I want to be careful here, because it is a score and scores feel solid.

This is a survey. The World Bank asks shipping people to rate the countries they ship to. It is not a machine measuring boxes at a port.

So if the score moves a little between rounds, that might be a different set of people answering, not a different country. The World Bank says this themselves.

The surveys also come at odd times. 2007, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, then a four-year jump to 2022. I drew my chart on a real timeline so that pandemic gap looks like the gap it was, instead of being squashed into an even row of dots.

One last small thing. The overall score is not the average of the six. The World Bank weighs them. So I did not recalculate it myself, and I added a test that complains if anyone ever tries to.