The World Bank approved on Wednesday a loan of 200 million U.S. dollars to the Philippines, its biggest to the Southeast Asian country in 10 years, to address the declining quality of basic education, the Department of Finance said.

"This support has a strategic focus: fiscal reform in the short term and helping the Department of Education be more effective in the longer term," Finance Secretary Margarito Teves said in a statement.

"The World Bank's strategy for the Philippines is designed to support those strategic priorities in the national budget that achieve fiscal stability and improved governance," said Joachim von Amsberg, the World Bank's country director for the Philippines.

The Philippine government's spending on social services such as education and infrastructure has been constrained in recent years by a large budget deficit and heavy debt load of about 76 billion U.S. dollars, according to the statement.

National and international tests have shown that the country's human capital had been slowly eroding, largely due to minimal investment in education, the statement said.

Source: Xinhua