WHEN it comes to economics, most of us
who do not comprehend what GDP is all about or how a calculator arrives at such
percentages, just smirk and watch the
world go by. Every time, for instance,
President Noynoy Aquino (who, by the way will go down the annals to be the only
one who has completely stopped the proliferation of wang-wang and merited it as a presidential achievement) returns
from a trip abroad and Malacañang announces the billions of dollars that he
brings home in investments, most of us just brush it off—not because such
investments are nowhere to be seen, but perhaps because the intricacies of
investment business are unintelligible to most Filipinos.
When
Malacañang media, which is presently touted to be one of the strongest media organizations in the land, announced that the country
has happily crossed the threshold of 7.8-percent growth in gross domestic
product by the first quarter of this year, the country should have uproared in
jubilation. But it never made a dent,
notwithstanding tremendous PR work. For
most, it sounded like a freak that was so incongruent with the givens of
reality. Those in the know were asking
where were those figures coming from.
Yes,
where are those figures coming from?
Because how can a country attain a 7.8-percent growth in domestic
product when, on the other hand, the country’s unemployment has plummeted to
7.5-percent in April 2013—the highest, so far, in three years. According to the National Statistics Office
Labor Force Survey, the number of unemployed Filipinos rose to 3.09 million—an
increase from 2.89 million in January, while the number of the under-employed
stood at 7.25 percent of the workforce.
Former Budget secretary Benjamin Diokno tersely says it all: “A fast
growing economy is supposed to create more, not less, jobs.”
The
heavily hyped investment pledges that the President brings home whenever he
returns from a foreign trip should be bearing fruit by now after, say, three
years. But lately government finance
agencies have admitted that foreign direct investments (FDI) have declined
around the first quarter. Central Bank was quick to issue a justification that
the decline in cumulative FDI was due “mainly to lower net equity capital
investments” in the first quarter and that the FDI outflow of $78 million was a
reversal of the inflow of $179 million of last year. This financial gobbledygook sounds Greet to
us, but whatever it is, one can be sure that what the Central Bank said was a
tacit admittance that there really is a hitch.
Of late, on June
13 to be exact, the Philippine stock exchange index has plunged to 6.75 percent
or 442.57 points that closed at 6,114.08—the biggest single-day loss since
October 2008, the “worst bloodbaths” in the history of local finance market, so
say economists. It was the same day that Philippine peso hit a new record low
at 43.00 against the U.S. dollar. It was
also the day that traffic in Manila stood still for 6 hours due to heavy
flooding, largely due to government neglect and lopsided priorities.
Perhaps it’s
about time to get real and accept that the wang-wang
president has failed in attracting long-term foreign investments (granting that
such is really the best economic fundamental as his technocrats claim) and in
creating sustainable domestic jobs for Filipinos without having to go to the
Middle East or Europe and elsewhere.
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