EDITORIAL

Global Mobility of Pinoys Can’t Ease
Homeland Joblessness Significantly

IF DATA were to be believed, not even the daily exodus of Filipinos for work and permanent residency in other countries has eased domestic unemployment significantly.

Packaged govern-ment data on domestic employment conditions and overseas migration by a statistical compendium showed that annual increases of the number of workers and emigrants departing overseas has not made the total number of Filipino unemployed go below 2.2 million workers.

This is even if government data generators have adopted in 2005 a new definition of who are "employed" and "unemployed," that has included overseas workers.

In 2007, there were a combined total of 1,158,222 temporary and permanent migrants who registered with government entities. The total is 3.43 percent of the 33.671 million who are employed in the Philippines.

In terms of the number of actual unemployed workers, the Philippines had its lowest in 2007 with 2.248 million, said the quarterly Labor Force Survey. However, the ratio of the number of registered temporary and permanent migrants to the number of Filipinos who are jobless reached an 11-year high, 51.51 percent in 2007. The unemployment rate in 2007 was at 7.4 percent.

The country, in 2004, had its lowest overseas Filipinos-unemployed Filipinos ratio in 2003 at 25.68 (when there were 998,512 overseas Filipinos and 3.886 million unemployed) when the domestic unemployment rate was at 10.9 percent (the last year the government adopted the old definition of who are employed and unemployed).

Concerns have been raised lately that the ongoing global economic crisis, as well as recession levels of economic growth in the 30 leading economies of the world, will pull up unemployment rates in the Philippines and lead to retrenchments of Filipino workers who are tem-porary and permanent migrants in many developed countries.

But even before the country’s real-economy will be feeling the effect of the global economic crisis, and even during episodes of domestic economic growth (like the 7.2 percent GDP growth in 2007), economists and analysts have wondered why the Philippines is not generating as much jobs for over a decade.

Though, some experts think the overseas migration of Filipinos has helped ease domestic employment, while past labor officials have remarked that the number of unemployed workers at home would have been more without overseas migration.

Since 2004, labor officials have targeted a million deployed migrant workers (also called temporary migrants) per year, which the country achieved since 2005.

And it has been the billion-dollar remittances of some 8.7 million overseas Filipinos in 239 countries that have kept inducing consumption in the Philippines. International thinktanks like A.T. Kearney and multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have observed that overseas Filipinos’ remittances have been the positive face of Philippine economic growth.

Data of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) from 1975 to 2007 show that the Philippine banking system has received US$120.281 billion of cash remittances from overseas Filipinos.

Statistical data proving the positive and negative consequences of Filipinos’ international migration can be found in the first Philippine Migration and Development Statistical Almanac that government and academic partners, and the nonprofit Institute for Migration and Development Issues are launched last year at the University of Santo Tomas.

The Statistical Almanac also has data of overseas Filipinos in 239 countries of destinations and in all 79 Philippine provinces.

The Commission on Filipinos Overseas, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, the BSP, the UST Social Research Center, and IMDI collaborated to produce the statistical compendium. The Almanac’s 1,000 book copies, and files in its website version (http://almanac. ofwphilanthropy.org), are for free.

The Peace and Equity Foundation, the Philippine Migrants’ Rights Watch, US-based migrant donor groups Feed the Hungry-Philippines and Save-a-Tahanan Inc., and the Economic Resource Center for Overseas Filipinos partnered in producing this first Migration and Develop-ment Statistical Almanac.

The data show foreign employment for Pilipinos will not ease local unemployment. There is the need to hold Pilipino specialists and skills in the country to produce industrial products for export abroad. It is not for Pilipinos to work abroad and sell their products in the Philippines. /MP