The income per capita of Quezon City is “still low,” and there is a need to increase revenue generation to benefit citizens, Vice Mayor Joy Belmonte said Monday.
While Quezon City consistently ranks among top cities in terms of revenue generation, Belmonte said there is much room for improvement to drive up the income for each city resident.
“Many say we are the richest city with an P18.5-billion budget, and then we even passed a supplemental budget of another P6 billion. But having said that, we must bear in mind that those are in absolute terms, not in per capita,” the vice mayor said.
“If you talk about [the budget] per capita, we are not a rich city at all. We have so much more people,” she added.
According to Belmonte, although Quezon City is usually being compared to the city of Makati, the latter has almost the same budget as QC but is only a fraction of “the City of Stars” in terms of population and size.
“We have 3.1-million people and we are one-fourth of Metro Manila, so in other words, we cannot talk about income in absolute terms, but we have to talk about it in the context of the size and the demographics of a city,” she said.