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Philippines

In the Philippines, the local official equivalent of the town is the municipality (Filipino: bayan). Every municipality, or town, in the country has a mayor (alkalde) and a vice mayor (bise alkalde) as well as local town officials (Sangguniang Bayan). Philippine towns, otherwise called municipalities, are composed of a number of villages and communities called barangays with one (or a few cluster of) barangay (s) serving as the town center or poblacion.

Unique in Philippine towns is that they have fixed budget, population and land requirements to become as such, i.e. from a barangay, or a cluster of such, to a town, or to become cities, i.e. from town to a city. Respectively, examples of these are the town of B. E. Dujali in Davao del Norte province, which was formed in 1998 from a cluster of five barangays, and the city of El Salvador, which was converted from a town to a city in 2007. Each town in the Philippines was classified by its annual income and budget.

A sharp, hierarchical distinction exists between Philippine cities (lungsod or siyudad) and towns, as towns in the country are juridically separate from cities, which are typically larger and more populous (some smaller and less populated) and which political and economic status are above those of towns. This was further supported and indicated by the income classification system implemented by the National Department of Finance, to which both cities and towns fell into their respective categories that indicate they are such as stated under Philippine law. However, both towns and cities equally share the status as local government units (LGUs) grouped under and belong to provinces and regions; both each are composed of barangays and are governed by a mayor and a vice mayor supplemented by their respective LGU legislative councils. However despite this some towns in the Philippines are significantly larger than some cities in the Philippines such as Rodriguez, Rizal, Santa Maria, Bulacan and Minglanilla, Cebu are actually bigger than some regional centers.