DAVAO CITY—This city was behind only three Metro Manila cities in the top competitive highly urbanized cities, keeping its consistent form in the top 5 list since 2015.
The city bagged the Fourth Most Competitive City in the Highly-Urbanized category during the 2018 Cities and Municipalities Competitiveness Index Awards at the sixth Regional Competitiveness Summit held at the Philippine International Convention Center on August 16.
Ivan Cortez, officer in charge of the City Planning and Development Office, said the award was accorded by the Department of Trade and Industry to city governments that show outstanding performance in the field of economic dynamism, government efficiency, infrastructure and resiliency.
“The award is the testament of all the efforts made by all of the departments of the city government to bring development to Davao City,” Cortez said. “With this award, we can see that the government is unceasingly giving its best to continue to improve its services.”
Davao City placed third in economic dynamism, taking into consideration factors like the size of economy, sources of material, structure of economy, safety compliance of businesses, cost of living, financial deepening involving the number of financial institutions within the city and number of people employed.
The city also landed third in infrastructure, which include roads, water and power utilities, telecommunication, number of transport vehicles, education and health facilities, and financial technology capacity.
In resilience, Davao ranked second, over its performance in land-use planning, disaster-risk management plan, early-warning systems and emergency infrastructures.
Cortez said Davao was ranked behind Quezon City, Pasay and Manila.
The selection was made involving 33 highly urbanized cities.
He added the city was consistent on the top 5 list of highly urbanized cities since 2015.
The cities and municipalities competitiveness index measures a local government unit’s competitiveness and presents an opportunity for local governments to better understand their performance against global standards. This also gives an avenue for them to come up with well-informed decisions toward becoming a more competitive LGU, he added.