All the President’s lies
FOR the past few weeks, President Benigno Aquino III and his trusted lieutenants have been passing off the fiction that all is well with the economy.
The building blocks of this illusion was a 7.8-percent growth in gross domestic product, a series of credit rating upgrades and recent record highs at the stock market.
Last week, the facade began to fall away as the Philippine stock exchange index plunged 6.75 percent, its biggest single-day loss since October 2008.
Like a weasel that only takes credit and never the blame, one of the President’s many spokesmen disavowed any responsibility for the recent stock meltdown, blaming it on “external factors” rather than any significant change in “the fundamentals.”
What the spokesman failed to address, however, were the clear signs that those same touted fundamentals weren’t all that great from the start for anybody who was willing to look beyond the administration’s shallow claims.
A key indicator that we should have focused on was the number of jobs that this administration has been able to generate.
Unfortunately, unemployment actually worsened to 7.5 percent
in April, the highest in three years, despite the GDP growth, the National Statistics Office Labor Force Survey showed.
The number of unemployed Filipinos rose to 3.09 million – up from 2.89 million in January, while the number of the under-employed stood at 7.25 million or 19.2 percent of the workforce, practically unchanged from April 2012.
The administration blamed the poor employment figures on a seasonal decline in agriculture, but the clear message from the NSO statistics was that the economy was not creating enough jobs in farming or anywhere else to meet the growing number of new entrants in the labor market.
“A fast growing economy is supposed to create more, not less, jobs,” said Benjamin Diokno, who was Budget secretary under the Estrada administration.
“Yet more jobs were lost this April compared to April 2012. If the economy has really grown at 7.8 percent as trumpeted by Malacanang, how come joblessness has increased? The inconvenient truth is that the unemployment rate could have been worse had more workers looked for a job,” he added.
Another clue that all was not well with the touted “economic fundamentals” was the steep 8.5 percent decline in foreign direct investments in the first quarter compared to the same period last year.
The central bank said the decline in cumulative FDI was due “mainly to lower net equity capital investments” in the first quarter. The net FDI outflow of $78 million was a reversal of the inflow of $179 million in the same month last year.
The bottom line in these statistics is that notwithstanding its PR claims, this administration has failed miserably in attracting long-term foreign investments and creating enough jobs that give Filipinos a decent living wage – without having to leave the country.
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