The public sector endeavored to pay foreign loans well ahead of their original due date, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
This helped push the country’s total foreign loan prepayments to swell in the third quarter of 2015.
The country’s total prepayments on medium- and long-term foreign debt in the January-to-September period in 2015 hit $2.34 billion.
This was double the volume of prepayments in the same period in 2014.
The total prepayments in the first nine months of 2014 totaled only $1.11 billion.
Prepayments on foreign loans are advance payments made by borrowers before the official maturity date of the loan.
Medium- to long-term loans are the debts payable in five years or more.
The surge in total prepayments during the period was driven by the public sector’s willingness to pay their foreign loans in advance.
In particular, public-sector prepayments hit $1.47 billion in the first nine months of 2015, up from prepayments in the same period in 2014 at only $953.7 million.
Likewise, the private sector was keen on repaying debts ahead of time as total prepaid loans hit $875.2 million in the first three quarters last year, up from the $160 billion in the previous year.
Prepayments on the country’s foreign loans are affected, among many other factors, by the exchange rate of the local currency the peso relative to the US dollar during the period.
A weaker peso means the country’s foreign loans increases in value when expressed in peso terms.