By Satur C. Ocampo
At Ground Level | The Philippine Star

That the gross domestic product grew by 7.5% in the second quarter of 2013 the fourth consecutive quarterly GDP growth rate at 7% may continue to elate the Aquino administration. It gushingly parlays the international rating agencies’ reference to the Philippines as, next to China, the fastest-growing economy in Asia.

It’s time for the administration, however, to critically examine the downside of this positive trend, in pursuance of P-Noy’s avowed goal to attain “inclusive” growth — wherein the benefits of such growth must be shared equitably by all Filipinos. That has not happened yet.

The government can start by seriously addressing the “jobless-growth” syndrome that has characterized economic performance over the last several years. This pertains to the rising level of national wealth production without a corresponding increase in the rate of employment – worse, with even increasing joblessness.

For instance, as of July 2013 (per the quarterly Labor Force Survey by the National Statistics Office), unemployment rose to 7.3% (3 million jobless looking for work), from 7% (2.85 million) in July 2012. Underemployment was placed at 19.2% (7.34 million employed but working at less than 40 hours a week), a significant dip from 8.57 million in July 2012.

Of the 41.18-million total labor force, 38.18 million were employed, including 10.82M self-employed and 3.86M unpaid family workers.

Socioeconomic Planning Secretary and NEDA Director-General Arsenio M. Balisacan shared his views on this problem early this week. He told reporters that if the GDP growth rate could be sustained at 7-8% until 2016 (when the Aquino administration ends), the unemployment rate could be kept lower at 6.5% and underemployment, at 15%. How that could be done he didn’t specify.

These data are instructive: From July 2012 to July 2013, the government provided 620,000 additional jobs which, Balisacan said, would have reduced unemployment to 6.6%. But because 777,000 working-age people entered the labor force, the net result was an addition of 157,000 to the unemployed.

Definitely the way forward is to create more regular paying jobs — over the long term via a thoroughgoing development of agriculture and building of national industry. Such will create much-needed jobs to employ most of those currently jobless, who may need retraining for new jobs, plus the yearly increments to the labor force.

Related to perennial unemployment-underemployment are the twin problems, also perennial, of poverty and hunger.

According to the Social Weather Station quarterly surveys, families that rated themselves poor constituted 49% in 2009, 48% in 2010, 49% in 2011, and 52% in 2012. Hunger incidence, the SWS reports, has stayed at 18% since 2007.

P-Noy’s Philippine Development Plan — which basically continues his predecessors’ plans and is biased towards foreign investors, having been endorsed by the Joint Foreign Chambers of the Philippines — has neither resolved the jobless-growth syndrome nor reduced poverty and hunger.

Thus the plan must be reoriented not only towards providing more job opportunities but, more important, towards uplifting the overall socioeconomic conditions of the poor.

One of the many critics of the PDP is former National Treasurer Leonor Magtolis Briones, lead convenor of Social Watch Philippines, which advocates for an alternative budgeting process. She’s supporting the abolition of the pork-barrel system and calls for public scrutiny, among others, of the P310-billion lump-sum special purpose fund controlled by the President. Briones observed:

“The extremely poor are asking the Philippine government and the international community: Why, after more than a decade of investing so much on implementing goals to end the worst forms of human deprivation, can we not achieve economic growth without so many people being left behind?”

There are 1.9 billion extremely poor worldwide, Briones said, who are hungry, sick, illiterate, jobless, landless, homeless.

She vented her criticism against the gravely-flawed PDPs implemented under successive Philippine presidents and the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs (a set of targets ratified by 189 member-states in 2000 to improve the socioeconomic conditions of the world’s poor by 2016).

Sarah Salvador, national coordinator for the SWP urban-poor partner in alternative-budget advocacy, bitterly chimed in:

“The UN and the governments should make clear what kind of poverty they want to eradicate. The extremely poor never felt being part of economic growth and sustainable development. They do not feel that their lives have become better with the MDGs. Conditional cash transfers help them send their children to school and avail themselves of health services, but poverty is never addressed.”

Balisacan would do well to seriously look into these criticisms and complaints, and those of the workers, the poor peasants in the countryside, and the indigenous peoples in the hinterlands. He should mull over this remark of Allie Cortez, a division chief in the NEDA social development staff:

“The views of vulnerable groups give us a new perspective. The government is doing many things, but it needs to listen to the perspective of people directly affected by its decisions. This enlightens the government on gaps in implementing development programs.”

The problem, however, is not merely about “gaps” in program implementation. The problem is in the nature of the development programs which, as Briones and other critics have indicated, set targets favoring big business corporations, not the extremely poor people.

View previous articles from this author | Subscribe to this author via RSS

* * *

E-mail: satur.ocampo@gmail.com
September 14, 2013

 Save as PDF