Philippine underemployment worst since 2006 – ADB

MANILA – The number of employed Filipinos still looking for extra income hit a 6-year high this year, the Asian Development Bank said on Wednesday.

Citing the most recent labor force data of the National Statistics Office, Norio Usui, ADB senior country economist, said the 22.7 percent underemployment rate in July is the worst since 2006.

Underemployment surged from 19 percent in July last year, even as unemployment fell to 7 percent this year from 7.1 percent in 2011.

Although the number of new jobs grew by a million over the past year, this only slightly exceeded overall growth in the labor force and reflected a rise in part time employment with 1.5 million positions created, the ADB said, adding that full-time jobs fell by 500,000 in the same period.

“My question is, the growth is here, why people still cannot find real benefit from there,” Usui told reporters during a briefing.

Philippine gross domestic product growth averaged 4.7 percent since 2000. In the first half of this year, the economy grew by 6.1 percent, at the high end of the government’s 5-6 percent full-year target.

“Despite solid economic growth, job generation remains inadequate, reflected in rates of unemployment and underemployment,” Neeraj Jain, ADB country director for the Philippine said, adding that the incidence of poverty remains high at 26.5 percent compared with 26.4 percent in 2006 and 24.9 percent in 2003.

In its Asian Development Outlook Update, the ADB raised its economic growth forecast for the Philippines to 5.5 percent this year from an earlier projection of 4.8 percent.

For 2013, the ADB kept its GDP growth forecast for the Philippines at 5 percent.

Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan admitted that the big challenge for the Philippines is to address underemployment, which remains “quite high.”

” I think the industry, the manufacturing sector has to be revived because that’s where most of the good quality employment,” Balisacan said.

Balisacan said the economy has to create jobs at a rate faster than the rate of increase in the labor force and population.

“Our government is very much working hard to address this issue. Remember that this very high focus on social protection is essentially meant to address that because it takes time to create this environment for the creation of jobs because you need to get the infrastructure programs moving, you need to develop infrastructure that could attract investors,” he added. -Darwin G. Amojelar, InterAksyon.com