Unemployment, poverty pose biggest challenges to Noynoy

MANILA, Philippines - Lack of jobs and extreme poverty are the two biggest problems the incoming government will have to solve.

This was the assessment of former Budget Secretary, now UP economics professor Benjamin Diokno in speaking on the prospects for the Nonoy Aquino administration during the general membership meeting of the Philippine Food Exporters and Processors Organization (PHILFOODEX) held recently at the Club Filipino in Greenhills.

He said that as of 2008, there were 2.7 million Filipinos who had no jobs and another 8.5 million who have occasional work only. Making this worse are 1.3 million people who join the labor force every year as they either reach the age of 18, graduating from college or technical or vocational schools.

“If you are looking for a job, that means you are unemployed,” the economist explained. “If you already stopped looking for a job, you are no longer part of the labor force. If, on the other hand, you told the census people that you worked only one hour for the past week, it means you are underemployed and not totally jobless.”

As a consequence of the dearth of good jobs in the local front, poverty incidence, Diokno further explained, reached 32.9 percent the other year. And due to the impact of the global recession, this could have grown to 34 percent last year.

Those who are poor are families that survive below $1 or roughly P45 a day, Diokno pointed out.

He traced the high jobless rate and widespread poverty to lack of foreign direct investments that he said is the lowest among the original ASEAN 5 plus Vietnam. It averaged between $500 and $700 million a year in the past decade.

With a very thin industrial and manufacturing sector, Diokno suggested that heavy investments should go into agriculture, but exporters should now target the close to 100 million Filipinos in the domestic front as a market, instead of trying to sell abroad.