PANAY NEWS’ maiden issue (April 7, 1981) cost P1.
That P1 price four decades ago is now equivalent to P16.95 (as of 2019), according to worlddata.info’s Inflation Calculator for the Philippines, taking into consideration the development of inflation rates for consumer goods in the Philippines through the years.
The inflation rate in 2019 was 2.48 percent. It was 13.08 percent in 1981 – a difficult year for the Philippines.
Two years earlier, in 1979, the country was hit hard by the second global oil crisis of the decade. It weathered the first global oil crisis, in 1973, but by 1979 the commodities boom which had propped up its economy in the early 1970s had died down, leaving the Philippines much more vulnerable – so much so that in the third quarter of 1981, the Philippine economy followed the course of the US economy when it went into recession.
