For Many Filipinos, Jobs and the Good Life Are Still Scarce

MANILA — At his vegetable stand on a busy street in the Philippine capital, Lamberto Tagarro is surrounded by gleaming, modern skyscrapers, between which a river of luxury vehicles flows.

“The Philippines is the rising tiger economy of Asia,” Mr. Tagarro said. “But only the rich people are going up and up. I’m not feeling it.”

Mr. Tagarro earns the equivalent of about $5 a day working from before dawn until after dark, battling petty corruption to maintain his improvised sidewalk stand and dealing with rising wholesale prices for the onions and tomatoes he sells.

The Philippines, with a 7.8 percent expansion of gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2013, has the fastest-growing economy in East Asia, surpassing even China’s. The country has a red-hot stock market, a surging currency and a steady stream of accolades and upgrades from international ratings agencies.

But Mr. Tagarro’s experience — of being left behind by the country’s newfound prosperity — mirrors that of many Filipinos, according to the latest government poverty and employment data.

President Benigno S. Aquino III ran on a platform of clamping down on corruption, improving the business environment in the country and addressing widespread poverty. In his first three years in office, Mr. Aquino removed high-level government officials accused of corruption, cracked down on tax evaders and aggressively courted foreign investment.

In March, Mr. Aquino’s efforts were rewarded when the country received, for the first time, an investment-grade credit rating from Fitch Ratings, one of the world’s major ratings agencies.

Though Mr. Aquino’s efforts to improve the economy have received high-profile accolades, he has had less success in addressing the country’s persistent, widespread poverty.

Indeed, Mr. Aquino’s political opponents argued in advance of recent legislative elections that his actions had further enriched the wealthy and left the poor behind.

Despite the rapidly expanding economy, the country’s unemployment rate increased to 7.5 percent in April, from 6.9 percent at the same time a year earlier. About three million Filipinos who want to work are unemployed.

“Higher rates of economic growth over recent years have not made a serious dent in the employment problem in the Philippines,” the Asian Development Bank reported in its recent Asian Development Outlook report.

An estimated seven million Filipinos, about 17 percent of the work force, have gone overseas in search of jobs, according to the Asian Development Bank. For those who stay home, there are few options.

The Philippines has a strong service sector. In 2011, it overtook India as a top provider of offshore call centers.

But the country lacks the manufacturing base that has lifted millions of people out of poverty in other Asian countries.

In countries like China, the rural poor increased their income by finding jobs in factories. That is rarely an option in the Philippines, and few poor people from the countryside are qualified to work in a call center.

The country’s latest poverty data, released in April, show almost no improvement in the past six years. About 10 percent of Filipinos live in extreme poverty, unable to meet their most basic food needs. This is the same figure as in 2006 and 2009, the previous years when poverty data were gathered, according to the National Statistical Coordination Board.

The board also estimated that 22.3 percent of families were living in poverty in the first four months of 2012, compared with 22.9 percent in 2009 and 23.4 percent in 2006.

According to government estimates, more than nine million extremely poor Filipino households are not able to earn the 5,460 pesos, or $135, needed each month to eat. That amount is about the same as the price of a back-row upper-level ticket to the recent Aerosmith concert in Manila, where many of the country’s wealthy could be found partying into the night.

Other reports confirm the government’s findings that poverty has persisted.

In a survey by the independent Manila polling group Social Weather Stations, the number of Filipino families reporting that they periodically go hungry has increased in recent months.

The survey found that 19.2 percent of survey respondents, about 3.9 million families, reported going hungry. This is up from 16.3 percent in December 2012, when a similar survey was done.

Meanwhile, the Philippines has slipped on the U.N. Human Development Index, ranking 114th of 187 countries in 2012 in categories like health, education and infant mortality. The country had a ranking of 105 in 2007.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/global/for-many-filipinos-jobs-and-the-good-life-are-still-scarce.html?partner=rss&emc=rss