Educated Filipinos can’t find jobs–World Bank

While educated Filipinos were vital to the Philippine economy, the World Bank noted that most of them were unemployed.

In a study, “Education and Wage Differentials in the Philippines,” the Washington-based lender reported that the best-educated Filipinos or those with a university diploma have the highest unemployment rate of 9.3 percent, followed by 3 percent for those with less than elementary education and 5 percent for those with only elementary education.

“The high unemployment rate among the best educated may to some extent reflect the frictions between supply and demand of high skilled labor and the relatively long time spent in job-hunting of individuals in this group,” according to the study.

Of the total Filipino labor force, females are on average better educated than males as those who are less educated tend to choose not to enter the labor market.

For example, the bank said, 32 percent of females in the labor force have completed university education or above, compared with only 14 percent of males; only 8 percent of females in the labor force have not completed elementary-school education compared with 13 percent of males.

“As the unemployment rate and daily wage are similar between males and females, the fact that females are better educated suggests, to some extent, that females may in fact still face tougher conditions in the market compared with their male counterparts with similar education background,” the World Bank reported.

Education and wages

The report added that education plays an important role in wage differentials in the Philippines.
“A large part of inequality stems from the difference in wages between the less educated and the better educated,” the bank said.

At the national level, education accounts for about 30 percent of the difference in wages. It makes for a higher percentage of the difference between female workers than between male workers.

Across regions, education accounts for 20 percent to 30 percent of the difference in wages between National Capital Region (NCR, or Metro Manila) and Visayas and between the capital region and Mindanao; across sectors, it accounts for 6 percent (agricultural), 14 percent (manufacturing), and 33 percent (service) of the difference in wages.

The report said that university graduates earn P354 a day, and those with no elementary education earn less than one-third of that, or P106 a day.

Given this, the World Bank report added that efforts to improve education to increase the supply of highly educated people were important for economic efficiency enhancement and growth acceleration.

“They are important not only for long-term growth, but also for helping to translate growth into more equal opportunities for the children of the current generation,” the report said. –DARWIN G. AMOJELAR SENIOR REPORTER, Manila Times