AT THIS time when most parts of the world are heading into recession, it is exciting that the Philippines is being seen as an economic outperformer in Southeast Asia by no less than the World Economic Forum.
The government expects full-year 2022 gross domestic product growth rate to exceed its target range of 6.5 to 7.5 percent, and President Marcos has expressed optimism that growth this 2023 would remain robust at seven percent.
So much for statistics. The real challenge for the Marcos administration is to translate the economic growth that past governments strived to achieve into more jobs, more food, and more houses for the people.
Millions of Filipinos are still experiencing bouts of involuntary hunger. A large section of the nation is on a forced diet. Many more are unemployed or underemployed. When one in every four in the labor force is jobless or is just working occasionally, then what we have is job-less growth.
The lack of domestic jobs has fueled the great Filipino Diaspora, and money remittances of these economic refugees have kept the economy afloat, triggered consumption spending, which in turn stimulated the economy but which the past Arroyo, Aquino and Duterte administrations unabashedly claimed credit for.
Remember the state propaganda extolling the country’s gross domestic product growth as “ramdam na ramdam ng taongbayan?” Growth might be concentrated on certain areas or social strata only. If we have pockets of prosperity amid large cavities of poverty, then this is growth without equity. When over a million families need a roof over their heads, when millions of our countrymen cannot buy essential drugs, when millions more do not have access to regular clean drinking water, or when three in 10 Grade 1 students won’t be able to finish high school, then what we have is growth we can only read in the papers but one that we cannot personally feel.
Widespread hunger and poverty prove that effects of economic growth spurts have yet to trickle down. And this is being blunted all the more by the global economic uncertainties.
Depressing realities on the ground cannot be denied. Many of our people are left behind, or are entirely left out.
