The articles on this page are from a foreigner living in the P.I. He has been there less than 2 years and been the object of many, many unsuccessful scams/extortions by real estate people, police, business license governmental agencies, and even the fire department. He is a person with a high intellect, especially with numbers.
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I have stated before that believing statistics from the Philippines Government is like believing in Santa Claus. The article below confirms my suspicions.
The PI Government reports the unemployment rate at 6.8%
Whilst the SWS report maintains the unemployment rate is 27.9%, I think it is far worse.
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((Mar 21 update at bottom))
((Feb 24 09)) To explain; the PI workforce is 37 million, 11 million are OFWs, therefore the actual local workforce is 26 million, of which 11 million are unemployed. It can be deduced that the unemployment rate is 43%.
((Ahhhhhhhhhhh, finally the truth by one of our more intellectual readers! He kicks a goal!))
Zimbabwe and the Philippines are similar in this respect.
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11 million Filipinos in adult labor force unemployed - SWS survey By Helen Flores and Mayen Jaymalin Updated February 24, 2009 12:00 AM
MANILA, Philippines - About 11 million Filipino adults or 27.9 percent of the adult labor force are unemployed, a recent survey by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) showed.
The survey, conducted from Nov. 28 to Dec. 1, 2008, also found hunger higher among families of the unemployed (31.4 percent) compared to families of the employed (consisting of private and government employees and the self-employed).
The percentage of unemployed adults in the SWS surveys has been 20 percent and above since May 2005, except for December 2007 when it was 17.5 percent, the survey firm said.
“In the SWS data series which began in 1993, unemployment was below 15 percent until March 2004, and then ranged from 16.5 percent to 19 percent from August 2004 to March 2005,” it said.
SWS said unemployment raises the vulnerability of families to hunger.
The non-commissioned survey found that Total Hunger, or experiencing involuntary hunger at least once in the past three months, was 31.4 percent among families of the unemployed, compared to 29.2 percent among families of private employees, 19.7 percent among families of the self-employed, and 12.7 percent among families of government employees.
Severe Hunger, referring to those who experienced involuntary hunger “Often” or “Always” in the last three months, is 7.6 percent among the unemployed, also 7.6 percent among private employees, 2.6 percent among the self-employed, and also 2.6 percent among government employees.
Moderate Hunger, referring to those who experienced it “Only Once” or “A Few Times” in the last three months, is 23.8 percent among the unemployed, compared to 21.6 percent among private employees, 17.1 percent among the self-employed, and 10.1 percent among government employees.
The SWS said its data on unemployment refer to the population of adults in the labor force. This is because respondents in the standard SWS surveys are those at least 18 years old.
The 1993-2008 figures are consistently based on the traditional definition of unemployment as not working and at the same time looking for work. Those not working but not looking for work are excluded from the labor force; these are housewives, retired, disabled, students, etc., the SWS said.
On the other hand, the official lower boundary of the labor force has always been 15 years of age. Formerly, the official definition of unemployment was not working and looking for work.
However, from April 2005 onward, the new official definition has included the concept of availability for work; it subtracts those not available for work, even though looking for work, and adds those available for work but not seeking work for the following reasons:
tired/believe no work is available, awaiting results of a job application, temporarily ill/disabled, bad weather, and waiting for rehire/job recall.
“If the official definition is applied, the unemployment rate among adults 18 years old is 22.3 percent in the SWS December 2008 survey,” it said.
“It is lower than when computed using the traditional definition because the correction for those looking for work but ‘not truly available’ is much larger than the correction for those ‘actually available’ though not looking for work at the moment,” it said.
The Fourth Quarter of 2008 Social Weather Survey was conducted using face-to-face interviews of 1,500 adults in Metro Manila, the balance of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.
It has sampling error margins of ±2.5 percent for national percentages, ±6 percent for Metro Manila, Visayas and Mindanao, and ±4 percent for balance Luzon.
Meanwhile, the Department of Labor and Employment reported that over 500 workers are losing their jobs or getting less pay every day due to the global financial crisis.
Data from the DOLE-Bureau of Labor and Employment and Statistics (BLES) showed a total of 84,615 workers nationwide or a daily average of 562 workers were affected by the financial slump for the past five months.
Of the total figure, 39,309 workers were retrenched from their jobs permanently, while 45,306 were placed under reduced working hours.
A majority of the displaced workers were from manufacturing and electronics companies.
Manufacturing workers accounted for 64,912 of the total affected workers.
Labor Secretary Marianito Roque, for his part, said at least 39,000 Filipinos have lost their jobs since October as factories and companies laid off workers amid the deepening global financial crisis.
“As of last Friday, we have about 39,000 fall outs. These are workers who have lost their jobs mainly in the electronics and manufacturing sector,” Roque told the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines.
The 39,000 included more than 5,400 overseas-based Filipinos who had lost their jobs in the Middle East and Taiwan, which accounted for the bulk of the returning workers, Roque said. He added the figure was based on official reports by industry leaders as well as trade groups.
He said the government had allotted P7 billion to create 180,000 “emergency jobs” this year as a stop-gap measure to prevent unemployment from ballooning.
Based on the data gathered by the labor department from October to Feb. 16, Calabarzon suffered the brunt of the economic crisis where a total of 49,613 workers were either displaced or were placed under reduced working hours.
CARAGA region reported the second biggest number of crisis-affected workers at 10,225 for the past four months, followed by Central Visayas with 8,529 and Central Luzon with 6,212.
But Labor Undersecretary Rosalinda Baldoz maintained that the number of displaced workers nationwide due to the crisis has remained low and still within manageable levels.
Baldoz noted that so far only 435 or 1.5 percent of the more than 33,000 commercial establishments nationwide were affected by the crisis.
She noted that the number of displaced workers only accounted for a low 2.5 percent of the 3.3 million employed in the country.
“More than 3,000 of the displaced workers were provided emergency employment and another 5,000 affected workers also availed of the government’s various assistance programs,” Baldoz added.
She also reported that displacement of Filipino workers has already tapered off.
“We are no longer getting any report of OFWs being laid off and forced to return home. I think the retrenchment abroad has already slowed down,” she said.
Government has enough resources
Roque said the government has enough resources to create temporary employment opportunities in the next two years, but would be hard pressed if the crisis extended beyond that.
He also noted that many Filipinos lost their jobs in the real estate and services sector in Dubai, but had managed to find employment elsewhere in the United Arab Emirates.
He said of the estimated 300,000 Filipinos in the UAE, 2,000 were now out of work.
Placements for Filipino nurses in the United States were also “dropping,” with only 700 contracts up for grabs last year, compared with up to 8,000 available three years ago, he said.
The jobless rate among Filipinos abroad could be much higher, he conceded, noting that a large portion of the eight million Filipino workers abroad were without proper documentation.
The government has already launched a retraining program for those who lost their jobs, with the business process outsourcing sector expected to provide opportunities as it is projected to grow 20 percent this year despite the crisis, Roque said.
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((Feb 25 09)) GMA is quick to dispute the SWS unemployment figures. However, she does not provide any substance to her allegations, merely arguing that the estimate is not scientific. The fact remains that there is no scientific method available in PI to measure unemployment. In more developed nations the unemployment figure is derived from people that are recipients of unemployment benefits, these benefits are usually managed by various government social services institutions. The PI has no such institution or any mechanism that could verify these statistics, in their own publications they assert these statistics to be estimates. And a false estimate in this case.
The unemployment rate reported by the PI government has irked me for a while, it is obvious that there is no means by which this statistic can be obtained.
Over the weekend (21 Feb 09) I read a Wikipedia article on GMA, within the article it quotes the United Nations estimate of people living in hunger in the Philippines as 23.7% (Dec 2008)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Macapagal-Arroyo).
It is plain that when hunger is at these levels that unemployment must also be at a high level. From a spread sheet I developed, I extrapolated an unemployment figure of 11.3 million. This is an unemployment rate of 44%, two days later the SWS released their estimate of 11 million, the timing of the release of the SWS estimate is quite ironic.
On the same spread sheet I also extrapolated an estimate of unemployment based on OFW remittances. It is known that an OFW remittance on average supports 3 family members in the PI. These family members are unemployed, living in hunger etc… Using the same scientific equations based on age group and participation rate, the result was 13.8 million unemployed or an unemployment rate of 53%.
The PI government estimate of 6.8% is a joke.
It is easy to understand why GMA would want to dispute these figures, however, it would be better if she acknowledged the problem and put in place measures to deal with it. Shipping the PI problems overseas is not a solution!
Article originally taken from here before being copied and placed below
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GMA disputes results of SWS unemployment survey
Updated February 25, 2009 12:00 AM
CLARK FIELD, Pampanga, Philippines – President Arroyo and her labor chief disputed the latest Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey showing the national unemployment rate at 27.9 percent, saying job opportunities remain plentiful, even abroad.
President Arroyo told the Integrated Bar of the Philippines-Pampanga chapter at the Holiday Inn here that the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration is processing 3,000 jobs a day as new job markets continue to open up in other countries.
“There are job opportunities,” she said.
“Therefore we want to have our workers find higher paying jobs or avail of reintegration services and livelihood assistance, should any expatriate workers return to the Philippines or for the export workers who get retrenched,” she said.
The President said the government is ensuring that adequate support is provided to displaced workers to keep them competitive.
The SWS survey covered the period Nov. 28 to Dec.1, 2008.
Labor Secretary Marianito Roque, for his part, dismissed the SWS survey as “accurate only for questions with dichotomous responses like yes or no” unlike the “more scientific” Labor Force Survey done by the National Statistics Office. ((Ho, ho, ho, ho, here comes Santa Claus))
Roque noted that the Labor Force Survey has 50,000 household samples nationwide compared with only 1,200 samples of the SWS which were drawn from the Commission on Elections’ list of voters.
He said the voters’ list, if used as basis for surveys, “may not be of equal probability, hence does not capture adequate changes in national unemployment situation.”
Roque said the domestic unemployment figure is only 39,000 as of last week.
Of the figure, 12,000 have been assisted by the government in finding replacement jobs.
Meanwhile, the labor department has sent a team to South Korea to discuss with the country’s education officials the possibility of hiring Filipino teachers.
Roque said the DOLE team discussed with Korean Ministry of Education officials the prospects of hiring Filipino English teachers as well as other professional workers in the Incheon Free Export Zone. – Marvin Sy and Mayen Jaymalin
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((Mar 21 09)) Getting closer to the truth.
The President GMA administration is still trying to contort the realities of the unemployment rate by using terms like underemployment.
This is how PGMA was able to curb unemployment;
"When Romy Neri was NEDA head, PGMA ordered him to change the definition of unemployed to be somebody who is jobless and looking for work. This eliminated those who are jobless but are no longer actively looking for work (Why bother looking if there are no jobs). This effectively brought down the unemployment figures, but did not add to real employment".
Therefore, if there are no jobs available in the region, there is also no unemployment. Catch 22.
At the top of this page they inadvertently admit to a humongous jobless rate of 46%!
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