The Philippines, a group of over 7,000 islands with combined land area encompassing 300,000 square kilometres, grew into a nation under more than three centuries of Spanish conquest and 42 years of American rule. It is the first country outside the New World that closely witnessed the United States’ rise to power following the 1898 Spanish-American War.
Situated 800 kilometres southeast of mainland Asia, the archipelago, named after King Philip II of Spain, was discovered in 1521 by Ferdinand Magellan, the same explorer who had discovered the Pacific Ocean in search of the so-called “Spice Islands” and is now widely considered the first navigator to have cruised around the planet.
Ironically, the Filipinos, after having been subdued for centuries by foreign colonizers as a result of Magellan’s voyage, would emerge as the best seafarers in the world, manning a third of all international vessels today. Some 7.8 million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and Filipino migrants would help rebuild cities in many countries and bring back over US$10 billion in annual remittances to their families in the Philippines.
The country’s geographical location and long exposure to foreign influences has placed the Philippines on a unique cultural base in Asia. It is now the only predominantly Catholic country in the region, with 70 million out of its total population of 85 million (as of 2005) confessing to be Catholic. There are also large numbers of Protestants and Born-Again Christians in the country while the Muslim population is concentrated in southern Mindanao.
Early Trade
The first inhabitants of the Philippines were the Negritos who traveled from mainland Asia over a land bridge that is now underwater. Migrants from other Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia later followed and established a Malayan culture that flourished before the Spaniards came. Chinese and Arab merchants helped establish markets at the community level.
A sultanate system, first established in the southern island of Sulu in the 14th century, is believed to have reached the islands of Luzon and Visayas, giving way to the rise of the Islamic faith. The Spaniards would later drive the Muslims to the south and establish Catholicism as the main religion in the north and central parts of the country.
Local villages, known as barangay, traded agricultural and fishery products with each other. The Igorot tribe in Northern Luzon carved the marvellous Banaue Rice Terraces from the mountains, a proof of their advanced agriculture technology. Communities near the shore exchanged goods with Chinese and Arab merchants, who came aboard large ships. These communities traded slaves, gold, beeswax, betel nuts, pearls, and shells for porcelain, silk, iron, tin and semi-precious stones.
The Philippine islands were a part of an extensive trade route used by Chinese merchants as early as the 10th century. By the time Magellan arrived in the islands, regular trade and cultural contact between Chinese traders and local chieftains were firmly instituted. Many Chinese merchants settled in the country and shared their crafts with the natives. Some historians claim that an Italian Franciscan priest, named Father Odorico, was actually the first European to have reached the Philippines in 1324 when his ship bound for China took refuge from a storm in Bolinao Island in northern part of Luzon.
Aside from the Banaue Rice Terraces in the Cordillera Mountains, early settlers did not leave any giant monument, and this is what makes conservative historians doubt the existence of the rich kingdoms in the country hundreds of years ago. However, it cannot be denied that early Filipinos were learned individuals who expressed their beliefs and sentiments in rich languages. According to the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), there are actually 78 language groupings and over 500 dialects in the Philippines.
Feudal Society
Magellan, who claimed the archipelago for Spain in 1521, died in a battle with a group of local warriors led by Lapu Lapu at Mactan Island. It was Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, in the fourth Spanish expedition, who named the territory as Filipinas after the heir to the Spanish throne in 1543. In 1565, Miguel Lopez de Legaspi led an expedition to colonize the islands and by 1571, most parts of the archipelago came under Spanish rule.
The Spaniards established the colonial government first in Cebu in 1565 and then in Manila in 1571. Historians claim that University of San Carlos in Cebu and University of Sto. Tomas in Manila are the oldest universities teaching European type of education in Asia. Jesuit and Dominican priests established the two institutions.
Under Spanish rule, Catholicism became the dominant religion. Catholic friars not only lorded over the congregations; they enjoyed vast political and economic influence, which they eventually used to repress Filipino peasants’ uprisings in the largely feudal Philippine society at that time. The Spaniards also quelled a number of rebellions instigated by the Chinese migrants. The friars distributed lands to Spanish families, who later comprised the landowning class. To perpetuate their economic interests, this class would also rise to become the political elite that would remain in power to this day.
This gave way to the hacienda system in the Philippines, where cacique or landowners managed large tracts of lands tilled by peasant workers. Under the system, farmers were supposed to receive half of the harvest, but they usually ended up with much less because they had to pay for large interests on debt incurred from the cacique. This would be later corrected with a system of land reform, which, however, remains to be fully implemented to this day.
Galleon Trade
The Manila-Acapulco galleon trade became the major trading system between Asia and the Americas for nearly two centuries. Manila became a transhipment point of American silver to China. It was through this trade that the first Chinese silk and porcelain reached the shores of the New World. There were unverified claims that Filipinos helped build the city of Los Angeles in America. The Chinese and Filipinos would later become the two largest Asian migrant groups in the United States.
Coconut became the country’s top agricultural product, because of Spain’s huge need for charcoaled coconut shells used for the caulking of the galleons. In 1642, the colonial government issued an edict requiring each Filipino to plant 200 coconut trees all over the country. By 1910, coconut exports would account for a fifth of total Philippine exports and to this day, coconut oil remains the country’s top agricultural shipment.
The Galleon Trade lasted for about 200 years until 1815. It is during this period that rice and tropical fruits from the Philippines such as mango and banana made their way to Latin America. Beginning 1750, Spanish priests encouraged the development of plantations to grow abaca (hemp), tobacco, coffee and sugar. Sugar barons from the Visayas would later emerge as among the richest clans in the country.
From 1762 to 1764, the British briefly captured Manila during the Seven Years War. The treaty of Paris ended the British occupation and returned the colony to the hands of their original colonial masters.
Plantation Crops
In 1781, the Spanish governor established the tobacco monopoly in the Philippines, which would become a major source of revenue for the colonial government. From 1820 to 1870, the Philippines would be transformed to an agricultural export economy. Located on the oceanic trading routes connecting Asia to other parts of the world, the Philippines became a transhipment point of merchandise goods from all over Southeast Asia on their way to Europe.
The Philippines exported plantation crops such as sugar, abaca, other fibres, tobacco, coffee, and coconut products to China, Spain, United States, United Kingdom and British East Indies. In return, it imported textiles and rice.
Historians claim that Spain administered the Philippine affairs through Mexico. Spanish administrators in the country were actually reporting to the Viceroyalty of Mexico. After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, Madrid directly governed its only Asian colony and even allowed rich Filipinos to study in Europe. The Spanish rule gave way to the rise of a small but highly powerful elite class, which to this day, controls most of the Philippine economy. The elite families, which own large plantations, were able to send their children to Europe for education.
Foreign Investors
Investors from Spain, Germany, Britain and other European countries laid the groundwork for utility companies in steam navigation, cable, telegraphy, railroads and electricity in the country. They also invested heavily in rice and sugar milling, textile and banking. The local elite developed the brewing industry, which would become one of the most profitable sectors in the economy.
Although the educated Filipinos who studied in Europe shunned the use of force to topple the colonial government, their writings provoked nationalist sentiments among young men, who eventually formed a revolutionary movement against Spain. In 1896, the war between Spanish and Filipino soldiers escalated following the death of novelist Jose Rizal and rebel leader Andres Bonifacio. Emilio Aguinaldo, the new leader of the revolutionary forces, forged a pact with US Commodore George Dewey in Hong Kong to defeat the Spanish army.
American Colony
The Americans entered the scene because of its conflict with Spain over Cuba. With the outbreak of the Spanish-American war in the Pacific, the Philippines had to be taken by the US, lest other European countries such as Britain, France and Germany would fight for their next Southeast Asian colony. On June 12, 1898, Aguinaldo, first backed by American forces, declared the independence of Kawit, Cavite, the seat of the revolutionary Filipino government at that time, from Spanish rule. The Americans took possession of Manila on August 13, 1898.
While armed clashes with Spanish forces continued in other parts of the country, the Americans and the Spaniards were negotiating for the purchase of the Philippines for US$20 million. In the Treaty of Paris in 1898, Spain ceded the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the US.
Filipinos felt insulted at the fact that their country has been passed from one colonial master to another for only US$20 million. When the US, which had not conquered any country before, made known its intention to succeed Spain as the next colonizer of the Philippines, Aguinaldo and his men waged a revolutionary resistance that ended with his capture in March 1901. The American soldiers easily subdued the remaining factions of rebellion with the help of their powerful weapons and their divide-and-conquer tactic.
As an archipelago of 7,000 islands, the Philippines is home to different ethnic groups which do not speak the same language. The national government’s attempt to declare Tagalog (spoken in Central and Southern Luzon including Metro Manila) as the national language would not easily win the support of other regions.
The Philippine-American war took the lives of 4,234 American and 16,000 Filipino soldiers. The death toll was much higher on the civilian population, with as high as 200,000 casualties. Although local resistance persisted until 1903, the US ended its military rule on July 4, 1901.
American Way
Under American civilian rule, the Philippines was introduced to US-type of education, Protestant religion, and later to the concept of democracy. Placed under US control were most parts of the country, except in the southern portion of Mindanao where Muslim rebels held strong resistance.
William Howard Taft, the 27th US president, was the first American Civil Governor in the Philippines. Taft was praised for establishing a civil service system, creating a national legislature, suppressing prices, upgrading health standards, and sponsoring land reform and road building in the country.
In 1907, the First Philippine Assembly composed of educated and rich Filipinos with vast landholdings. Manuel L. Quezon, who represented the Philippines in the US Congress, lobbied for the passage of the Jones Law, which in 1916 abolished the Philippine Assembly to give way for a bicameral legislature made up of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
With the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934, Filipinos had their first taste of self-rule through the Philippine Commonwealth, a transitional government designed to prepare the Filipinos over a ten-year period for independence. By 1935, the Commonwealth was in place with Quezon as its first president. The Philippines also approved a new constitution in the same year.
The United States is credited for helping establish the Republic of the Philippines, the first democratic government in Asia. Economically, the Philippines was ahead of its Asian neighbours, who were still subjects of European colonial powers before the war.
Japanese Invasion
In December 1941, the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the Philippines and drove the Commonwealth Government from Manila. While Quezon continued to head the government-in-exile until his death in New York in August 1944, the Japanese forces handpicked Jose P. Laurel, a graduate of Yale University and Tokyo International University, to head a new government under their control.
The Philippines was dragged into the war because of Japan’s military ambition to become the dominant force in Asia and the Pacific. Japan wanted to be the leader of an economic zone in East Asia, which would be the source of its raw materials. The US presence in the Philippines, known for its strategic location in Southeast Asia, was the largest threat to the Japanese forces, following the destruction of the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
While the American forces were regrouping in the United States, Filipino soldiers formed a guerrilla organization called Hukbalahap (People's Anti-Japanese Army). Some 30,000 guerrillas at that time engaged the Japanese army in intermittent clashes. The Hukbalahap would later adopt the communist ideology and rule in the countryside.
Meanwhile, Sergio Osmeña replaced Quezon as the head of the government-in-exile and joined General Douglas MacArthur in the liberation of Manila. General MacArthur returned to the Philippines via the island province of Leyte, along with 174,000 army and navy servicemen on October 20, 1944.
The liberation of Manila took almost 20 days from February 3 to 23, 1945 and the fierce battle destroyed much of the city, with its ruins now often compared to the ruins of Warsaw, Poland in Europe. The Japanese army, however, continued to fight in the provinces, until September 2, 1945 when General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya who was believed to have hidden vast amount of treasures during the war, surrendered in Baguio City.
It is estimated that the battle of Manila cost the lives of 1 million Filipinos, 300,000 Japanese and 60,000 Americans. The intensity of the US-Japan war would force the former to drop an atomic bomb in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and in Nagasaki three days later.
US Bases
By February 1945, Osmeña restored the Commonwealth in the Philippines but it was only on July 4, 1946 that the US granted the Philippines its independence, coinciding with the celebration of the Independence Day in America.
However, US military bases would remain in the country for the next 45 years. On March 14, 1947, Manila and Washington signed the Treaty of General Relation, which provided the US to construct military bases for a lease period of 99 years. In 1959, the agreement was amended to shorten the lease period until 1991, after which both sides were to renegotiate the contract.
When the US sought a ten-year extension of the lease period in 1991, the Philippine Senate, led by Senate President Jovito Salonga, rejected the proposal in a historic casting of vote on September 16, ending US military bases in the country.
With newfound freedom in 1946, Filipinos elected Manuel A. Roxas, leader of the Liberal Party and one of the seven members of the Constitutional Convention who drafted the 1935 Constitution, as the first president of the independent republic in April 1946. His presidency was focused on rebuilding the cities and municipalities torn by the war, redistributing lands as wealthy landowners returned to reclaim their estates, and confronting the Hukbalahap, which by this time was tagged as a socialist-communist organization. The economy grew at a rapid pace, immediately after the war.
Special Treatment
Close economic ties between Manila and Washington continued after the war on the back of agreements providing for preferential tariffs for American exports and special treatment for US investors in the Philippines. In the 1946 Philippine Trade Act, the Americans were granted duty-free access to the Philippine market and special rights to exploit the country’s natural resources. Because of the Trade Act, the Philippines suffered a huge trade deficit with the influx of American imports. In 1949, the Philippine government was forced to impose import controls, after getting the consent of Washington.
Roxas’ two-year presidency ended with his death, following a heart attack while delivering a speech at Clark Air Force Base in Pampanga province in April 1948. Vice president Elpidio Quirino succeeded Roxas as president and defeated Jose P. Laurel to keep his post in the 1949 presidential race. It was during Quirino’s term that the Minimum Wage Law was enacted and the Central Bank was established to stabilize the peso and consumer prices. The country’s gross national product grew by an average of 7.7 percent annually in the early 1960s, on the back of the double-digit increase in the manufacturing sector.
In the 1953 presidential election, Ramon Magsaysay, who had served as defense secretary under the Quirino administration, won by a landslide. The charismatic Magsaysay initiated peace talks with the Hukbalahap, which would later evolve into a communist organization. He became popular for opening the gates of Malacanang Palace to ordinary people. He died in a plane crash on Mount Manunggal in Cebu in March 1957, which to this day remains a mystery to many Filipinos.
While the standard of living in the Philippines was below that of the Western World, the country was often cited as the second richest economy in Asia, after Japan in the 1960s. However, ill-advised economic policies, poor governance and rapid population growth in the country would allow other Asian economies such as Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand and China not only to catch up with but to leave the Philippines behind in the race towards industrialization.
Filipino First
Vice President Carlos P. Garcia assumed the country’s top government post following the death of Magsaysay. Garcia was known for his First Filipino Policy and Austerity Program, which put the interests of Filipinos ahead those of foreigners. Under his austerity measures, he encouraged temperate spending, which resulted in less imports and more exports. His nationalist policies, however, perpetuated the business interests of the ruling elite in the country and did not encourage local businesses to be competitive. Garcia lost to his vice-president in the 1961 presidential poll. Protectionist policies allowed local manufacturers to control the economy from 1949 to 1962, discouraging them from becoming competitive.
Diosdado Macapagal, father of incumbent President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, was the president from 1961 to 1965. Before he became president, he authored the land reform program as a legislator and was vice-president to Garcia. As president, Macapagal began a five-year socio-economic program by removing imports control and liberalizing foreign exchange. It was Macapagal who declared June 12 as the national Independence Day. In 1962, the Macapagal administration began devaluing the peso by half to around 3.90 to the US dollar.
Macapagal initiated a shift in investments from the light industries to chemicals, steel and industrial equipment. He was also one of the proponents of the MAPHILINDO, a trade bloc of three South East Asian countries – the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia. This bloc later expanded to what is now the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). By 1965, foreign capital was present in nearly a third of the country’s capital stock.
Martial Law
Ferdinand Marcos, the Senate president, defeated Macapagal in the presidential election to become the country’s tenth president in November 1965. A close ally of the United States, Marcos launched military campaigns against the insurgents including the communist Hukbalahap and Moro rebels in Mindanao. In August 1967, Manila hosted a summit that led to the creation of the ASEAN.
With his reelection in 1969, Marcos had to contend with worsening civil strife. An ideologist named Jose Ma. Sison founded the Communist Party of the Philippines on December 26, 1968. It was during the same year that University of the Philippines Nur Misuari founded the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), the armed wing of Islamic resistance movement.
In June 1971, the government convened the Constitutional Convention to amend the Constitution. Ironically, Marcos declared Martial Law on September 21, 1972, following a series of bombings in Metro Manila, He abolished Congress, curtailed freedom of the press, imposed curfews, ordered the arrest of his political enemies, prohibited labour unions, and controlled the economy with the help of his cronies. Although his wife Imelda was credited for building some of the country’s finest monuments, she was criticized for personal extravagance, a form of which was maintaining a collection of 3,000 pairs of shoes.
Green Revolution
The so-called green revolution in the early 1970s, which introduced new farming technologies, enabled the Philippines to export rice to its neighbours. The International Rice Research Institute was established in Los Banos town, Laguna province where Thai, Vietnamese and other Asian researchers trained to develop their own rice production. Thailand would later become the world’s largest rice exporter and the Philippines one of the largest rice importers.
With the introduction of new farming technologies, the Philippines became heavily dependent on importer fertilizers, which are mostly fuel-based. The increase in world crude oil prices also pushed prices of fertilizers, to the detriment of Filipino farmers trying to adopt the modern technologies.
Chinese Tycoons
On June 9, 1975, the Marcos administration signed a joint communiqué with Communist China to restore official diplomatic relations. The Communiqué recognized that “there is but one China, of which Taiwan is an integral part. In return, China vowed not to interfere in the internal affairs of the Philippines and refrained from providing any substantial support to the Communist Party of the Philippines, the largest insurgent group in the country.
The largest success story in the Philippines actually involved Chinese merchants who left China in pursuit of business opportunities abroad. Unlike rich American investors, Chinese migrants came to the Philippines with little money but large determination that the country’s democratic society would help them become rich. True enough, they found goldmine in the Philippines. Today, the richest individuals in the Philippines have Chinese names, including billionaires such as Lucio Tan, Henry Sy, John Gokongwei, and George Ty. Together, they are the largest group of investors in the Philippines and control most of the largest companies in the country.
Overseas Workers
Under Martial Law, one man other than Marcos would singularly define labour relations in the Philippines and the role of the Filipino workers in the world. Labour Minister Blas Ople, a former journalist, authored the Labor Code on November 1, 1974 and launched the overseas employment program in 1976, which would send young and talented Filipinos who could not find work at home to other countries for dollar-earning jobs.
Ople obtained the permission of Marcos to deploy thousands of Filipino workers overseas to meet the growing need of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates for skilled workers and the rising demand for Filipino seamen in flag-of-convenience vessels. Hesitant at first, Marcos later conceded to the proposal, if only to tame the growing militancy building among the hearts of the young and intelligent Filipinos who could not find job opportunities in their own land.
The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) and the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) were established to intensify recruitment of Filipino workers. This would make the Philippines the third largest destination of dollar remittances in the world, next to the more populous countries of India and Mexico.
The Marcos administration also tried to court foreign investors, by committing guarantees against nationalization and imposing restrictions on trade-union activity. However, the blatant record of human rights abuses by the military under his administration was a big turnoff among foreigners. Under Martial law, the military and the police killed, abused, or arrested at least 10,000 Filipinos, including some of the brightest students and intellectuals. Many had disappeared without a trace.
While Marcos lifted martial law on January 17, 1981 in time for the visit of Pope John Paul II to Manila in February, he maintained most of his powers as a dictator. Benigno Aquino, an opposition senator living in asylum in the US, decided to return to Manila in 1983. His death, from assassins’ bullets at the tarmac of the Manila International Airport, sparked adverse sentiments against the Marcos administration.
Bankruptcy
As the economy stagnated under the Marcos administration because of a mix of bad economic policies, corruption and uncontrolled population growth, the government had to resort to foreign borrowing to finance the fiscal deficit. In October 1983, the Central Bank notified its creditors about its plan to default payment on debt amounting to US$24.6 billion. With the growing loss of confidence by the business community, the peso depreciated by as much as 21 percent in 1983. The gross domestic product shrank by 6.8 percent in 1984 and by 3.8 percent in 1985.
Emboldened by Marcos’ dipping popularity, the opposition gathered around Aquino’s widow, Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, who would later challenge Marcos in the 1986 snap presidential election. When Batasang Pambansa (National Assembly) declared Marcos the winner amid allegations of widespread electoral fraud, protesters, buoyed by Manila archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin, trooped to the streets.
Following the defection of Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Armed Forces vice chief Fidel Ramos from Marcos, protesters began converging along EDSA near Ortigas Avenue, which would culminate in the ouster of Marcos from Malacanang Palace on February 25, 1986. The media called the bloodless uprising as the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution - something that political groups would later thought could be replicated time and again.
Democratic Rule
After Marcos, his family and his cronies fled from the Philippines, Aquino became president, organized a new government, freed the political prisoners and tried to restore democratic rule in the country. In February 1987, her government approved a new Constitution, which would later be subjected to heated debates over its restrictive provisions on foreign participation in the economy.
The 1987 Constitution restored the presidential system of government with a bicameral legislature composed of the Senate and the House of Representatives and an independent judiciary headed by the Supreme Court chief justice. To avoid a replication of Marcos’ excesses, the Constitution limited the president’s stay in office to one six-year term. It also created the autonomous regions of Muslim Mindanao and Cordillera and put agrarian reform as the cornerstone of the government’s plan for social transformation.
A renegade faction in the Philippine military launched a series of coup attempts against the Aquino presidency. Perception of political instability dampened economic activities and refrained the economy from matching the large strides taken by its Asian neighbors in the 1980s and 1990s. By this time, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand have overtaken the Philippines in the race towards industrialization.
The Arroyo administration, while taking pride of having restored democracy, failed to bring the economy on track towards industrialization, and one of the factors singled out was the president’s political inexperience and lack of consistency in pushing for economic reforms. In the 1992 presidential election, Aquino endorsed the candidacy of her chosen successor – Defense Secretary Fidel Ramos.
In June 1991, Mount Pinatubo’s powerful eruption sent tons of ashes around the planet’s atmosphere. Subsequent lava/lahar flow buried several towns in Central Luzon and jolted the economy. The natural tragedy also forced American soldiers at Clark Field and Subic Bay to withdraw from their bases earlier than stipulated. The US turned over to the Philippine government the two bases with total assets amounting to US$1.3 billion. The Philippine government later transformed the two bases into special economic zones.
Liberalisation
In 1992, Fidel Ramos was elected President. He began his term amid an energy crisis, which plunged the country literally into darkness. This he was able to resolve by inviting foreign investors to take part in the so-called build-operate-transfer (BOT) scheme, where they would serve as independent power producers (IPPs) enjoying a lot of incentives and guaranteed market. While it brought light to Filipino households, the scheme would later translate to high electricity rates.
In 1995, the Ramos administration also had to contend with a rice shortage, as a result of low agricultural production and poorly managed importation program. Since then, the government has authorised the National Food Authority (NFA) to import rice at will in order to prepare for any shortage in domestic stock.
The Ramos presidency was also responsible for economic reforms such as privatisation of government assets, trade and banking liberalisation and deregulation, which would push annual trade growth at double-digit levels and draw in large-ticket foreign investments. By 1996, the Philippines was described as a newly industrialising economy along with the likes of Thailand and Malaysia.
It was also under the Ramos presidency that communism was legalised, and some leftist organisations would later join Congress as partylist groups. The government and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) headed by Nur Misuari would sign a peace agreement that would establish a peace zone in southern Philippines. However, other militant rebel groups such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Abu Sayyaf would continue waging a war against the government for a Islamic state in the south.
What Ramos failed to accomplish is the amendment to the 1987 Constitution to remove the restriction on foreign ownership of land and public utilities, which limits maximum ownership to 40 percent. The opposition party accused him of trying to tinker with the charter to remove the six-year term limit of the president and in the process perpetuate his stay in power. In the end, he had to give up such attempt under the weight of public opinion.
Financial Crisis
With the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis, the Philippine economy contracted by 0.6 percent in 1998, the same year Joseph Estrada, a popular politician with links to the movie industry, became president. The economy actually grew although at a slower pace at 3.4 percent in 1999 and at 4 percent in 2000 even as the inflation and interest rates began to decline. In comparison, growth reached 5.2 percent under the Ramos presidency in 1997.
While Estrada got the backing of Filipino-Chinese businessmen by reducing the problem of kidnapping, he did not get the same support from other “elite” businessmen. Despite appointing top economists, Estrada, a former college dropout, could not convince the “high society” that he could resolve the country’s economic woes.
Ironically, what brought down the Estrada administration was not his economic policies, seen by many as not substantially different from those of Ramos, but the perception of wide corruption in his administration. In October 2000, a former ally implicated Estrada in illegal gambling payoffs and kickbacks. Reports that he has many wives housed in different mansions also got Estrada indifferent treatment from the Church, which was a force behind the 1986 People’s Power Revolution.
EDSA 2
In December 2000, the House of Representatives impeached Estrada. The subsequent impeachment trial at the Senate was aborted when senators from the opposition party walked out of the courtroom, triggering street demonstrations reminiscent of the 1986 revolt. Within hours after the walkout, the crowd at EDSA grew into millions of anti-Estrada protesters. When political and military leaders withdrew their support from Estrada, Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide swore Vice President Gloria Mapacagal Arroyo as the next president on January 20, 2001.
Arroyo, a daughter of former President Diosdado Macapagal, came to Malacanang with a promise to clean the government of corrupt officials and bring down the number of poor Filipinos, which represents a third of the total population. In her first year in office, she faced numerous challenges starting with the May 1 rebellion, instigated by the Estrada camp to regain the presidency. The rebellion proved futile, as the highly politicised military and the police remained loyal to Arroyo.
She also had to contend with Muslim extremists, who began to target cities in their attacks. Following the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, the Philippines was one of the first countries to express support for a US-led international campaign against terrorism.
On the economic front, Congress passed the liberalisation of the retail trade sector and the Electric Power Industry Reform Act of 2001, which aims to privatise the state-owned National Power Corporation. The Arroyo administration also promoted business process outsourcing (BPO), information technology, tourism, and mining as key investment areas for foreign companies. Trade with other Asian countries was also given importance in view of the declining trade volume with the United States.
Telecommunications
One particular industry, which has led economic growth since 2000 is telecommunications, although this proved to be a bane for other industries as Filipinos cut their expenditures on other items to buy mobile phones and pay for monthly network services. By 2005, it is estimated that half of the 85 million Filipinos would have mobile phones, a high penetration rate for a developing market.
Because of the global economic slump following the September 11 attacks, the GDP grew by merely 1.8 percent in 2001. Growth reached 4.3 percent in 2002 and 4.7 percent in 2003 even as the Arroyo administration confronted communist and Islamic insurgency problems and a shocking military coup in July 2003.
After surviving the coup, Arroyo won the May 2004 presidential election over Estrada’s close friend and popular actor Fernando Poe Jr. Economic growth reached 6.1 percent in 2004, the highest in 15 years, although this was negated by high inflation and uncontrolled unemployment rates which were more felt by the poor.
Fiscal Deficit
Pressed by economists to narrow the burgeoning fiscal deficit, President Arroyo urged Congress to pass a package of tax reform measures aimed at achieving a balanced budget by the end of her term in 2010. Because of a long history of budget deficits, the public debt hit more than 130 percent of the GDP in 2003 and has been rising since then. Different sectors, however, criticised the administration for passing a heavier burden of taxation on the people at a time crude oil prices were hovering at historic high levels and pushing prices of goods and services beyond the capacity of ordinary consumers.
By the second half of 2005, there were signs that the fiscal deficit was narrowing, even with the delay in the implementation of the Expanded Value Added Tax (EVAT) law, which raised by 2 percentage points the tax rate on consumer products and services to 12 percent and by 3 percentage points the corporate income tax to 35 percent. The new EVAT law, which was expanded to cover fuel and electricity, took effect on November 1, 2005.
New Constitution
As the popularity of President Arroyo dipped to the lowest level amid allegations that she bought her way to the presidency in the 2004 presidential elections, she was given an option to correct the loopholes in the political system by amending the 1987 Constitution. She formed a Consultative Commission to recommend charter amendments focusing on lifting all restrictions to foreign investments and paving the way for a shift in the form of government from a presidential, central system into a parliamentary, federal system.
Showing posts with label Social. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Philippine population
Does size matter?
By RODERICK T. DELA CRUZ
TODAY Reporter
November 16, 2004
“Too many people doesn’t cause poverty; bad governance and policies do.”
Thus claimed a group of economists at the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) who insist that population growth has nothing to do with the grave poverty situation in the Philippines.
In their paper, the UA&P economists said they have found no evidence that “supports the claim that a large, fast-growing population causes more poverty.”
“Moreover, we have found that it is bad governance and bad economic policies that have caused poverty,” the authors said.
The paper was written by Roberto de Vera, Emilio Antonio, Ronilo Balbieran, Enrico Basilio, Jovi Dacanay, Stephen Huang, Maia Tyche King, Winston Stan Padojinog, Cherrylyn Rodolfo, Kimberly San Agustin, Leandro Tan, Cid Terosa, Peter Lee U and Bernardo Villegas.
In its 1999 report, the World Bank noted that many Filipino economists concurred that the country’s high population growth rate was a major cause of the widespread poverty, particularly in the rural areas. It is estimated that the Philippines has a population of over 80 million people, which increases by 1.7 million or close to 2 percent every year.
Analysts said the economy, with its dwindling resources, cannot support the expansion of the population, resulting in the increasing number of poor people.
Data from the National Statistics Office show that as of 2000, 34 percent of the Philippine population and 28.4 percent of all Filipino families are living in poverty.
Figures from the United Nation Development Program are more alarming, with 46.4 percent of Filipinos reportedly living on less than $2 a day.
MOST IMPORTANT CHALLENGE
Ernesto Pernia, the former lead economist of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and now a professor at the University of the Philippines School of Economics, said the single most important challenge for the Philippines has been and continues to be high poverty incidence.
In his paper “Population: Does It Matter? Revisiting an Old Issue,” which was presented at the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, Pernia said that because it has neglected the issue of population growth, the Philippines has not made any significant demographic transition.
“The country’s average per capita income and labor productivity [average output per worker] today are at the same levels as in the early 1980s. Why is this so? Population does matter. It matters to the question whether we will remain in a low-level equilibrium trap or get out of it,” Pernia said.
“The country has remained in a low-level equilibrium trap which involves a chain of low economic growth, high unemployment, low productivity, persistent poverty, declining human capital and high fertility feeding back into low economic growth and so on and so forth,” he said.
In order to break this vicious chain, he said a clear and consistent population policy, matched by an adequately funded action program, is needed.
“In the other East and Southeast Asian economies, sharp reductions in poverty have occurred as a consequence of rapid and sustained growth, attributable to sound economic policies coupled with strong population policy. These countries have been benefiting from a ‘demographic bonus’ resulting from an increasing share of workers [population aged 15-64] relative to young dependents [ages 0-14],” he said.
On the other hand, Pernia said the Philippines continues to be burdened by a “demographic onus” or large share of young dependents relative to workers.
“The lack of a clear and consistent population policy starkly sets the Philippines apart from the rest of East and Southeast Asia and partly explains its anemic economic growth and persistent mass poverty,” he said.
TWO-CHILD POLICY
Pernia acknowledged that some observers would point to problems of poor governance, corruption and political economy or to exogenous shocks brought about by trade liberalization and the World Trade Organization rules as the culprit.
The counter argument to this, he said, is that these problems or circumstances have also beset or affected the other Asian economies. And so the question remains: Why have they consistently performed better than the Philippines
To address poverty, Pernia gave three suggestions:
Reduce unwanted fertility (or meet unmet needs for? contraception) through a strong national family planning program, that includes both traditional and artificial methods of contraception;
Change the preference for large family? size through an incentive structure that raises the investment per child and lowers the demand for children; and
Reduce population momentum through promoting later age at? marriage, later childbearing, and wider birth spacing, made possible by a responsive family planning program.
The Population Commission warned that at its present pace of growth, the Philippine population would double from the present 84 million to around 168 million in 29 years. At present, the Philippines is ranked as the 12th most populated nation in the planet.
A study made by the Asian Institute of Management showed that if the population grows by 2 million a year, the Philippine economy has to expand by at least 10 percent annually over the next 10 years to be where Thailand is today.
Alarmed by these figures, Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman filed early this year House Bill 16, otherwise known as the Reproductive Health Care Act of 2004, which proposes a two-child policy. The bill seeks to limit the size of families to two children.
The bill also seeks to provide scholarship grants for children at the tertiary level of couples who can comply with the two-child policy.
The Catholic Church vehemently opposed the bill, saying that the roots of poverty in Philippine society go much deeper than the growing population.
DEBUNKING ASSERTIONS
In response, the economists from the UA&P, an institution that subscribes to the Opus Dei theology, denied the following assertions:
• A larger population worsens poverty. “On the contrary, poverty incidence actually went down as our population got larger,” de Vera said, explaining that as the population increased threefold from 27 million in 1961 to 76 million in 2000, the proportion of poor families fell from 59 percent in 1961 to 34 percent of all families in 2000. “It is true that poverty incidence increased from 32 percent in 1997 to 34 percent in 2000, but this increase was most likely due to the 1997 Asian financial crisis,” he added.
• Higher population densities mean lower personal incomes. De Vera argued that thickly populated areas can exhibit higher incomes and greater economic activity, noting that densely populated cities like Metro Manila, Cebu and Davao provide higher income opportunities than the less densely populated regions. For instance, Metro Manila, which had a population density of 15,617 persons per square kilometer, had a per capita income of P66,173 in 2000. This was more than thrice the per capita income of P19,291 in Central Visayas, which had a population density of 381 persons per square kilometer.
The case is similar in other countries, he said. For instance, there are countries, such as Bolivia, Kenya and Ethiopia, with lower population densities than the Philippines yet have lower personal incomes. Countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, with higher population densities also have higher personal incomes than the Philippines, he added.
De Vera said that based on their statistical analysis using population density and personal income, an average increase of 100 persons per square kilometer is associated with an increase of P292 to its personal income.
• Higher population growth leads to lower economic growth. De Vera said economic studies do not support this seemingly logical assertion, citing the 1966 book Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure and Spread by Nobel prize winner Simon Kuznets who said there is no clear association between rates of growth of population and of product per capita. Other studies, de Vera added, support Kuznets’s argument.
“So if population growth doesn’t affect economic growth, what will? Good governance and well-implemented economic policies do,” he said, adding that this is evident in the cases of East and West Germany, North and South Korea, and China and Taiwan. “In 1950, both the communist and noncommunist countries had practically the same birthrates and the centrally planned economies had less population pressure than their market-directed counterparts as measured by population per square kilometer.”
“Yet the economic growth of West Germany, South Korea and Taiwan was better than their counterpart centrally planned economies... Due to faster economic growth, personal incomes in Taiwan and South Korea were roughly double than those in China and North Korea, respectively while those in West Germany was more than 10 percent larger than East Germany’s in the 1980s,” he added.
• A larger population means more hungry and malnourished people. De Vera said that on the contrary, data from the Food and Agriculture Organization show that food supply available for consumption has increased and that the historical trend shows it will continue to outpace population growth in the future.
He said that the calories per person per day in the Philippines went up from 1,745.0 in 1961 to 2,379.3 in 2002 while the grams of protein per person increased from 40.6 to 56.1. “These national trends follow world trends,” he added.
“In some cases, it may in fact be sparse population that makes it difficult for people to access food supplies. This was the case of the famine in Sahel, West Africa in the 1970s,” he said.
• A larger population means less funds for education. De Vera said people get worried about this, since government funds may not be sufficient to provide the education needed by their citizens. However, he noted that based on the 1994 World Bank Policy Research Paper prepared by Lant Pritchett, there is no correlation between population growth and years of schooling.
In order to raise funds to construct the 18,000-classroom backlog, he said the government should instead focus its efforts in stopping tax evasion which amounted to P193.7 billion in 2001 alone and corruption, which cost the government over $48 billion over the past 20 years.
• Our population will double in 29 years. “We should not worry about this at all. First, the mere fact that our population is growing means that people are living longer,” de Vera said.
“Our growth rate is not out of control, for it is actually expected to go down, thanks to the fact that parents rationally adjust their family size based on the child mortalities and economic opportunities they face,” he said.
De Vera pointed out that the Philippines is far from reaching a “standing room only” situation. “We can fit the 2050 population of the whole Philippines in Luzon with a population density that is less than one-tenth the 2000 density of Metro Manila,” he said.
Moreover, he said the 6.396 billion people in the world today can fit on the island of Luzon, with each person getting 16 square meters of living space.
He noted that there are projections that the Philippine population will reach 166 million in 2033, or double the 83 million in 2004. However, this figure is way above the United Nations projection of only 130 million for 2033.
De Vera also said the fertility rates in the Philippines would drop from 2.36 percent in 1995-2000 to 1.98 percent in 2000-05 to 1.2 percent in 2030-35 and down to 0.92 percent in 2045-50.
• Larger families are poor families. While this may be true, de Vera insists that it would be poor judgment to use this observation as a basis for limiting the family size of poor people.
“It is not proven that a larger family size is what makes a poor family,” he said. “The more likely reason why some families are poor is the limited schooling of the household head.”
Data, he said, show that 78 percent to 90 percent of the poor households in each family size had heads with no high-school diplomas. “In other words, poor families are poor not because they are large but because most of their heads have limited schooling which prevents them from getting good paying jobs,” he said.
• Instituting a two-child policy will significantly reduce poverty. De Vera asserted that successfully implementing the two-child policy will not hasten the economic growth that will reduce poverty.
“Implementing this population control policy will put the country on a practically irreversible course of population decline and ageing whose consequences we would want to avoid,” he said.
De Vera said that according to Joseph Chamie, director of the UN Population Division, 60 countries or a third of the countries in the world have period fertility rates of below 2.1 percent. Fertility rates below the replacement rate of 2.1 percent means that these countries will eventually experience the decline and aging of their populations.
Among these countries, de Vera said, are Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, Poland, South Korea and Taiwan. He noted that the population of these countries started to decline because of the two-child policy.
“Instead of implementing a two-child population policy, we should focus our efforts on cashing in on a possible demographic dividend,” he said. This exists when a previously fast growing population decreases it growth rate and thus results in the labor force growing faster than the dependent population of children and elderly.
“If the proper policies are in place during this demographic stage, then the expected increase in savings and labor supply can be harnessed to sustain rapid economic growth that reduces poverty,” he said.
The Philippines, de Vera said, has a 35-year window of opportunity to reap this possible demographic dividend.
“Thus, nongovernment organizations, firms and government should focus their efforts on providing these future workers with access to education and training programs to prepare them to take well-paid jobs,” he concluded.
By RODERICK T. DELA CRUZ
TODAY Reporter
November 16, 2004
“Too many people doesn’t cause poverty; bad governance and policies do.”
Thus claimed a group of economists at the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) who insist that population growth has nothing to do with the grave poverty situation in the Philippines.
In their paper, the UA&P economists said they have found no evidence that “supports the claim that a large, fast-growing population causes more poverty.”
“Moreover, we have found that it is bad governance and bad economic policies that have caused poverty,” the authors said.
The paper was written by Roberto de Vera, Emilio Antonio, Ronilo Balbieran, Enrico Basilio, Jovi Dacanay, Stephen Huang, Maia Tyche King, Winston Stan Padojinog, Cherrylyn Rodolfo, Kimberly San Agustin, Leandro Tan, Cid Terosa, Peter Lee U and Bernardo Villegas.
In its 1999 report, the World Bank noted that many Filipino economists concurred that the country’s high population growth rate was a major cause of the widespread poverty, particularly in the rural areas. It is estimated that the Philippines has a population of over 80 million people, which increases by 1.7 million or close to 2 percent every year.
Analysts said the economy, with its dwindling resources, cannot support the expansion of the population, resulting in the increasing number of poor people.
Data from the National Statistics Office show that as of 2000, 34 percent of the Philippine population and 28.4 percent of all Filipino families are living in poverty.
Figures from the United Nation Development Program are more alarming, with 46.4 percent of Filipinos reportedly living on less than $2 a day.
MOST IMPORTANT CHALLENGE
Ernesto Pernia, the former lead economist of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and now a professor at the University of the Philippines School of Economics, said the single most important challenge for the Philippines has been and continues to be high poverty incidence.
In his paper “Population: Does It Matter? Revisiting an Old Issue,” which was presented at the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, Pernia said that because it has neglected the issue of population growth, the Philippines has not made any significant demographic transition.
“The country’s average per capita income and labor productivity [average output per worker] today are at the same levels as in the early 1980s. Why is this so? Population does matter. It matters to the question whether we will remain in a low-level equilibrium trap or get out of it,” Pernia said.
“The country has remained in a low-level equilibrium trap which involves a chain of low economic growth, high unemployment, low productivity, persistent poverty, declining human capital and high fertility feeding back into low economic growth and so on and so forth,” he said.
In order to break this vicious chain, he said a clear and consistent population policy, matched by an adequately funded action program, is needed.
“In the other East and Southeast Asian economies, sharp reductions in poverty have occurred as a consequence of rapid and sustained growth, attributable to sound economic policies coupled with strong population policy. These countries have been benefiting from a ‘demographic bonus’ resulting from an increasing share of workers [population aged 15-64] relative to young dependents [ages 0-14],” he said.
On the other hand, Pernia said the Philippines continues to be burdened by a “demographic onus” or large share of young dependents relative to workers.
“The lack of a clear and consistent population policy starkly sets the Philippines apart from the rest of East and Southeast Asia and partly explains its anemic economic growth and persistent mass poverty,” he said.
TWO-CHILD POLICY
Pernia acknowledged that some observers would point to problems of poor governance, corruption and political economy or to exogenous shocks brought about by trade liberalization and the World Trade Organization rules as the culprit.
The counter argument to this, he said, is that these problems or circumstances have also beset or affected the other Asian economies. And so the question remains: Why have they consistently performed better than the Philippines
To address poverty, Pernia gave three suggestions:
Reduce unwanted fertility (or meet unmet needs for? contraception) through a strong national family planning program, that includes both traditional and artificial methods of contraception;
Change the preference for large family? size through an incentive structure that raises the investment per child and lowers the demand for children; and
Reduce population momentum through promoting later age at? marriage, later childbearing, and wider birth spacing, made possible by a responsive family planning program.
The Population Commission warned that at its present pace of growth, the Philippine population would double from the present 84 million to around 168 million in 29 years. At present, the Philippines is ranked as the 12th most populated nation in the planet.
A study made by the Asian Institute of Management showed that if the population grows by 2 million a year, the Philippine economy has to expand by at least 10 percent annually over the next 10 years to be where Thailand is today.
Alarmed by these figures, Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman filed early this year House Bill 16, otherwise known as the Reproductive Health Care Act of 2004, which proposes a two-child policy. The bill seeks to limit the size of families to two children.
The bill also seeks to provide scholarship grants for children at the tertiary level of couples who can comply with the two-child policy.
The Catholic Church vehemently opposed the bill, saying that the roots of poverty in Philippine society go much deeper than the growing population.
DEBUNKING ASSERTIONS
In response, the economists from the UA&P, an institution that subscribes to the Opus Dei theology, denied the following assertions:
• A larger population worsens poverty. “On the contrary, poverty incidence actually went down as our population got larger,” de Vera said, explaining that as the population increased threefold from 27 million in 1961 to 76 million in 2000, the proportion of poor families fell from 59 percent in 1961 to 34 percent of all families in 2000. “It is true that poverty incidence increased from 32 percent in 1997 to 34 percent in 2000, but this increase was most likely due to the 1997 Asian financial crisis,” he added.
• Higher population densities mean lower personal incomes. De Vera argued that thickly populated areas can exhibit higher incomes and greater economic activity, noting that densely populated cities like Metro Manila, Cebu and Davao provide higher income opportunities than the less densely populated regions. For instance, Metro Manila, which had a population density of 15,617 persons per square kilometer, had a per capita income of P66,173 in 2000. This was more than thrice the per capita income of P19,291 in Central Visayas, which had a population density of 381 persons per square kilometer.
The case is similar in other countries, he said. For instance, there are countries, such as Bolivia, Kenya and Ethiopia, with lower population densities than the Philippines yet have lower personal incomes. Countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, with higher population densities also have higher personal incomes than the Philippines, he added.
De Vera said that based on their statistical analysis using population density and personal income, an average increase of 100 persons per square kilometer is associated with an increase of P292 to its personal income.
• Higher population growth leads to lower economic growth. De Vera said economic studies do not support this seemingly logical assertion, citing the 1966 book Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure and Spread by Nobel prize winner Simon Kuznets who said there is no clear association between rates of growth of population and of product per capita. Other studies, de Vera added, support Kuznets’s argument.
“So if population growth doesn’t affect economic growth, what will? Good governance and well-implemented economic policies do,” he said, adding that this is evident in the cases of East and West Germany, North and South Korea, and China and Taiwan. “In 1950, both the communist and noncommunist countries had practically the same birthrates and the centrally planned economies had less population pressure than their market-directed counterparts as measured by population per square kilometer.”
“Yet the economic growth of West Germany, South Korea and Taiwan was better than their counterpart centrally planned economies... Due to faster economic growth, personal incomes in Taiwan and South Korea were roughly double than those in China and North Korea, respectively while those in West Germany was more than 10 percent larger than East Germany’s in the 1980s,” he added.
• A larger population means more hungry and malnourished people. De Vera said that on the contrary, data from the Food and Agriculture Organization show that food supply available for consumption has increased and that the historical trend shows it will continue to outpace population growth in the future.
He said that the calories per person per day in the Philippines went up from 1,745.0 in 1961 to 2,379.3 in 2002 while the grams of protein per person increased from 40.6 to 56.1. “These national trends follow world trends,” he added.
“In some cases, it may in fact be sparse population that makes it difficult for people to access food supplies. This was the case of the famine in Sahel, West Africa in the 1970s,” he said.
• A larger population means less funds for education. De Vera said people get worried about this, since government funds may not be sufficient to provide the education needed by their citizens. However, he noted that based on the 1994 World Bank Policy Research Paper prepared by Lant Pritchett, there is no correlation between population growth and years of schooling.
In order to raise funds to construct the 18,000-classroom backlog, he said the government should instead focus its efforts in stopping tax evasion which amounted to P193.7 billion in 2001 alone and corruption, which cost the government over $48 billion over the past 20 years.
• Our population will double in 29 years. “We should not worry about this at all. First, the mere fact that our population is growing means that people are living longer,” de Vera said.
“Our growth rate is not out of control, for it is actually expected to go down, thanks to the fact that parents rationally adjust their family size based on the child mortalities and economic opportunities they face,” he said.
De Vera pointed out that the Philippines is far from reaching a “standing room only” situation. “We can fit the 2050 population of the whole Philippines in Luzon with a population density that is less than one-tenth the 2000 density of Metro Manila,” he said.
Moreover, he said the 6.396 billion people in the world today can fit on the island of Luzon, with each person getting 16 square meters of living space.
He noted that there are projections that the Philippine population will reach 166 million in 2033, or double the 83 million in 2004. However, this figure is way above the United Nations projection of only 130 million for 2033.
De Vera also said the fertility rates in the Philippines would drop from 2.36 percent in 1995-2000 to 1.98 percent in 2000-05 to 1.2 percent in 2030-35 and down to 0.92 percent in 2045-50.
• Larger families are poor families. While this may be true, de Vera insists that it would be poor judgment to use this observation as a basis for limiting the family size of poor people.
“It is not proven that a larger family size is what makes a poor family,” he said. “The more likely reason why some families are poor is the limited schooling of the household head.”
Data, he said, show that 78 percent to 90 percent of the poor households in each family size had heads with no high-school diplomas. “In other words, poor families are poor not because they are large but because most of their heads have limited schooling which prevents them from getting good paying jobs,” he said.
• Instituting a two-child policy will significantly reduce poverty. De Vera asserted that successfully implementing the two-child policy will not hasten the economic growth that will reduce poverty.
“Implementing this population control policy will put the country on a practically irreversible course of population decline and ageing whose consequences we would want to avoid,” he said.
De Vera said that according to Joseph Chamie, director of the UN Population Division, 60 countries or a third of the countries in the world have period fertility rates of below 2.1 percent. Fertility rates below the replacement rate of 2.1 percent means that these countries will eventually experience the decline and aging of their populations.
Among these countries, de Vera said, are Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, Poland, South Korea and Taiwan. He noted that the population of these countries started to decline because of the two-child policy.
“Instead of implementing a two-child population policy, we should focus our efforts on cashing in on a possible demographic dividend,” he said. This exists when a previously fast growing population decreases it growth rate and thus results in the labor force growing faster than the dependent population of children and elderly.
“If the proper policies are in place during this demographic stage, then the expected increase in savings and labor supply can be harnessed to sustain rapid economic growth that reduces poverty,” he said.
The Philippines, de Vera said, has a 35-year window of opportunity to reap this possible demographic dividend.
“Thus, nongovernment organizations, firms and government should focus their efforts on providing these future workers with access to education and training programs to prepare them to take well-paid jobs,” he concluded.
Philippine Population
Three Babies Every Minute
Three babies are born in the Philippines every minute, according to the National Statistics Office (NSO). The NSO arrived at this number based on the 1.669 million live births recorded for the year 2003. The data were obtained from birth certificates registered at the Local Civil Registry Office (LCRO).
It said that the 2003 figure was up slightly by 0.2 percent from 1.667 million live births recorded in 2002. "In 2003, the daily occurrence of births was 4,574 or 190 babies born every hour or 3 babies per minute," the statistics office said. Results of the survey also showed that more male babies were actually born than female babies. Of the total newly born babies, 868,749 were male while 800,693 were female.
Despite the slowing fertility rate, the survey indicates that some women were getting sexually active early, with young adult mothers (15 to 24 years old) delivering a third or 595,427 of the total births. Teenage mothers contributed 123,865 births or 7.4 percent of the total. About 756 mothers delivered their first-born at age below 15. .
Weddings in the Philippines
The National Statistics Office (NSO) has dispelled widely held beliefs that Catholic priests administer most weddings in the country during the month of June. Most likely, weddings take place in May, and in front of a judge or a politician. The NSO based the data on marriages officiated by priests, pastors, judges, mayors and others who are authorized by law to solemnize marriage in the year 2003.
It said that that 2,051 marriages took place each day in December; 2,042 in January; and only 1,920 in June. August was the least month of choice for wedding vows, with a daily average of only 1,033 marriages. A total of 593,553 marriages was recorded in 2003, up by 1.8 percent from 583,167 marriages registered in 2002.
Of the total marriages, 41.3 percent or more than two out of five were contracted through civil rites. In comparison, marriages under Roman Catholic church was ranked second with 220,393 or 37.1 percent.
The rest were solemnized under Islam (0.2 percent), tribal rites (0.2 percent) and other religious rites, (21.3 percent).
Results of the study also showed that about four out of ten brides got married at the age of 20-24 years old while nearly one out of three grooms married at the age group 25-29 years old. The median age at marriage was 25 for brides and 27 for grooms. There were 80,085 teenage brides (under 20 years old), representing 13.5 percent of the total, who got married in 2003, more than four times the 19,829 teenage grooms.
Of the total, some 13,497 or 2.3 percent Filipino brides tied knot with foreigner grooms while 3,598 Filipino grooms married foreigner brides.
Among foreign nationals, the most number of intermarriages involved Filipino brides with Japanese grooms (5,468). Other foreign nationals that were married to Filipino brides were the Americans, numbering 3,002; Australians, 569; Chinese, 393; Germans, 205; Spanish, 124; and other foreign nationals, 3,519. On the other hand, the highest number of intermarriages involving Filipino grooms were with Chinese brides (1,999) followed by Americans (514), Japanese (155), Spanish (129) and Australians bride (111).
Richest Towns
The Chinese district of Binondo in Manila and the town of San Juan have the least percentage of poor people in the country, according to the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB). Meanwhile, nearly nine out of ten residents of the towns of Hadji Panglima Tahil in Sulu and Bulalacao in Oriental Mindoro are living in poverty.
In its project-based poverty estimates for all the 1,623 cities and municipalities in the country based on 2000 data, the NSCB said 40 of these areas have poverty rates above 74 percent of their respective population.
The study showed that Binondo, a part of the city of Manila which was counted as a municipality, has the lowest poverty incidence of 2.74 percent. It was followed closely by San Juan, with 2.92 percent.
Meanwhile, Makati City is regarded as the city with the lowest poverty incidence of 3.74 percent, which was comparable with the situation in other progressive cities in Asia and Europe.
The cities of Pasig and Marikina have poverty rates of 5.33 percent and 5.52 percent, respectively. Outside Metro Manila, the industrial town of Imus recorded the lowest poverty incidence of 3.17 percent, followed by Noveleta, another municipality in Cavite, with 4.93 percent. Other towns with poverty incidence below 10 percent were Bacoor also in Cavite with 6.51 percent; Cabuyao in Laguna, with 6.94 percent; the Rizal towns of Angono and Cainta with 7.01 percent and 7.72 percent respectively; Marilao in Bulacan with 8.62 percent; and Basco in Batanese with 9.66 percent.
The city of Sta. Rosa in Laguna, which is home to various industrial parks, has the lowest poverty rate of 5.62 percent among all cities outside Metro Manila. It was followed by Baguio City, with 6.73 percent, Vigan City with 8.55 percent, and Bacolod City with 9.12 percent.
Meanwhile, the NSCB said majority of the municipalities that were considered poor in 2000 were in Mindanao, particularly in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.
Three babies are born in the Philippines every minute, according to the National Statistics Office (NSO). The NSO arrived at this number based on the 1.669 million live births recorded for the year 2003. The data were obtained from birth certificates registered at the Local Civil Registry Office (LCRO).
It said that the 2003 figure was up slightly by 0.2 percent from 1.667 million live births recorded in 2002. "In 2003, the daily occurrence of births was 4,574 or 190 babies born every hour or 3 babies per minute," the statistics office said. Results of the survey also showed that more male babies were actually born than female babies. Of the total newly born babies, 868,749 were male while 800,693 were female.
Despite the slowing fertility rate, the survey indicates that some women were getting sexually active early, with young adult mothers (15 to 24 years old) delivering a third or 595,427 of the total births. Teenage mothers contributed 123,865 births or 7.4 percent of the total. About 756 mothers delivered their first-born at age below 15. .
Weddings in the Philippines
The National Statistics Office (NSO) has dispelled widely held beliefs that Catholic priests administer most weddings in the country during the month of June. Most likely, weddings take place in May, and in front of a judge or a politician. The NSO based the data on marriages officiated by priests, pastors, judges, mayors and others who are authorized by law to solemnize marriage in the year 2003.
It said that that 2,051 marriages took place each day in December; 2,042 in January; and only 1,920 in June. August was the least month of choice for wedding vows, with a daily average of only 1,033 marriages. A total of 593,553 marriages was recorded in 2003, up by 1.8 percent from 583,167 marriages registered in 2002.
Of the total marriages, 41.3 percent or more than two out of five were contracted through civil rites. In comparison, marriages under Roman Catholic church was ranked second with 220,393 or 37.1 percent.
The rest were solemnized under Islam (0.2 percent), tribal rites (0.2 percent) and other religious rites, (21.3 percent).
Results of the study also showed that about four out of ten brides got married at the age of 20-24 years old while nearly one out of three grooms married at the age group 25-29 years old. The median age at marriage was 25 for brides and 27 for grooms. There were 80,085 teenage brides (under 20 years old), representing 13.5 percent of the total, who got married in 2003, more than four times the 19,829 teenage grooms.
Of the total, some 13,497 or 2.3 percent Filipino brides tied knot with foreigner grooms while 3,598 Filipino grooms married foreigner brides.
Among foreign nationals, the most number of intermarriages involved Filipino brides with Japanese grooms (5,468). Other foreign nationals that were married to Filipino brides were the Americans, numbering 3,002; Australians, 569; Chinese, 393; Germans, 205; Spanish, 124; and other foreign nationals, 3,519. On the other hand, the highest number of intermarriages involving Filipino grooms were with Chinese brides (1,999) followed by Americans (514), Japanese (155), Spanish (129) and Australians bride (111).
Richest Towns
The Chinese district of Binondo in Manila and the town of San Juan have the least percentage of poor people in the country, according to the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB). Meanwhile, nearly nine out of ten residents of the towns of Hadji Panglima Tahil in Sulu and Bulalacao in Oriental Mindoro are living in poverty.
In its project-based poverty estimates for all the 1,623 cities and municipalities in the country based on 2000 data, the NSCB said 40 of these areas have poverty rates above 74 percent of their respective population.
The study showed that Binondo, a part of the city of Manila which was counted as a municipality, has the lowest poverty incidence of 2.74 percent. It was followed closely by San Juan, with 2.92 percent.
Meanwhile, Makati City is regarded as the city with the lowest poverty incidence of 3.74 percent, which was comparable with the situation in other progressive cities in Asia and Europe.
The cities of Pasig and Marikina have poverty rates of 5.33 percent and 5.52 percent, respectively. Outside Metro Manila, the industrial town of Imus recorded the lowest poverty incidence of 3.17 percent, followed by Noveleta, another municipality in Cavite, with 4.93 percent. Other towns with poverty incidence below 10 percent were Bacoor also in Cavite with 6.51 percent; Cabuyao in Laguna, with 6.94 percent; the Rizal towns of Angono and Cainta with 7.01 percent and 7.72 percent respectively; Marilao in Bulacan with 8.62 percent; and Basco in Batanese with 9.66 percent.
The city of Sta. Rosa in Laguna, which is home to various industrial parks, has the lowest poverty rate of 5.62 percent among all cities outside Metro Manila. It was followed by Baguio City, with 6.73 percent, Vigan City with 8.55 percent, and Bacolod City with 9.12 percent.
Meanwhile, the NSCB said majority of the municipalities that were considered poor in 2000 were in Mindanao, particularly in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.
Filipino pilots and captains
The Philippines would need hundreds of new pilots over the next few years to support the rapid expansion of the airline industry amid the exodus of experienced Filipino pilots for foreign carriers.
Budget carrier Cebu Pacific said that in 2008 alone, it would recruit 100 new pilots who will man the company’s newly purchased aircraft.
Captain Johnny Andrews, vice president for flight operations of Philippine Airlines, said several Asian airlines have been trying to recruit Filipino pilots, with tempting offers of doubling their salaries. For example, he said that some Korean airlines were offering monthly salaries of $10,000 to $15,000, compared to an average of $4,000 to $6,000 that Filipino pilots receive.
The air transport industry estimated that more than 120 Filipino pilots, mostly PAL captains, have left the country to join foreign airlines since 2000. Andrews said that at present, PAL has 500 pilots, but only half were fully trained as captains.
He said that PAL was able to prevent more pilots from leaving the country by offering more competitive wages. “Since last year, we have alleviated the problem by adjusting the pay of pilots and providing more benefits,” he said.
While the pilot population slightly increased, when the retirement age of pilots was extended from 60 years to 65 years, Andrews said there are still challenges that the industry faces. “We cannot relax, we still see some problems,” he said, adding that the recent policy of International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) requiring international pilots to have minimum understanding of the English language could put more pressure on Philippine pilot population.
He said this may force airlines in China , Japan and Korea to look at the Philippines as the source of English-proficient pilots who can meet the ICAO requirements. “This is another threat we are facing,” he said.
The Geneva-based International Air Transport Association (IATA) said a shortage of highly trained pilots threatens the continuous growth of the global air transport industry, as the industry may need to recruit some 17,000 new pilots annually because of the expected industry growth and retirements.
IATA estimated that by 2011, the number of air passenger will exceed 2.75 billion and the world’s airlines will move 36 million tonnes of air cargo. “That’s 620 million more passengers and 7.5 million more tonnes of cargo than the industry handled in 2006,” the IATA said.
In 2007, the industry is estimated to have experienced a 5.9 percent growth in passenger traffic and 8.4 percent growth in revenues, despite the increase in oil prices which averaged US$73 per barrel last year.
In the Philippines , growth was even more spectacular. Budget carrier Cebu Pacific saw its passenger volume surge 58 percent year-on-year to over 5.49 million passengers in 2007. PAL and its sister firm Air Philippines also reported more than 5 million domestic passengers alone as of December 21, 2007.
PAL is buying six new Boeing 777, to be delivered September 2009. Andrews said PAL would be able to meet its pilot requirements until the completion of its expansion program, as long as there are no more captains leaving the company.
According to Clark Aviation, a British-owned pilot training institute based in Clark Field, Pampanga, the Philippines would be in need of more than 300 new pilots to provide enough coverage for all the new Airbus 320 planes to be delivered to local carriers during the period. Clark Aviation introduced the streamlined multi-crew pilot licence (MPL) training scheme in the country.
The company is currently training 150 cadets from all over the world in Clark on the new MPL scheme, including 65 cadets for Cebu Pacific.
Cebu Pacific plans to expand its fleet of A320/319 to include 29 aircraft, plus the new ATR planes from France that will service Caticlan. The Gokongwei-owned carrier tapped the services of Clark Aviation to undertake an intensive 12-month residential training program for its candidates for pilots.
Cebu Pacific spokesperson Candice Iyog said that because of this partnership with Clark Aviation, “Cebu Pacific does not feel the shortage of pilots at this point.”
The budget carrier, which is now one of the five largest in Asia , currently has 123 pilots in flight operations team and plans to recruit another 100 pilots this year. Iyog said the company offers a competitive compensation and benefit structure in the local market.” Our fun and team-focused culture also keep our employees attuned to stay,” she said.
To enable airlines to meet their pilot requirements, IATA encouraged companies to put more resources in training. “It’s time to ring the warning bell. We must re-think pilot training and qualification to further improve safety and increase training capacity,” said IATA director general and CEO Giovanni Bisignani.
Budget carrier Cebu Pacific said that in 2008 alone, it would recruit 100 new pilots who will man the company’s newly purchased aircraft.
Captain Johnny Andrews, vice president for flight operations of Philippine Airlines, said several Asian airlines have been trying to recruit Filipino pilots, with tempting offers of doubling their salaries. For example, he said that some Korean airlines were offering monthly salaries of $10,000 to $15,000, compared to an average of $4,000 to $6,000 that Filipino pilots receive.
The air transport industry estimated that more than 120 Filipino pilots, mostly PAL captains, have left the country to join foreign airlines since 2000. Andrews said that at present, PAL has 500 pilots, but only half were fully trained as captains.
He said that PAL was able to prevent more pilots from leaving the country by offering more competitive wages. “Since last year, we have alleviated the problem by adjusting the pay of pilots and providing more benefits,” he said.
While the pilot population slightly increased, when the retirement age of pilots was extended from 60 years to 65 years, Andrews said there are still challenges that the industry faces. “We cannot relax, we still see some problems,” he said, adding that the recent policy of International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) requiring international pilots to have minimum understanding of the English language could put more pressure on Philippine pilot population.
He said this may force airlines in China , Japan and Korea to look at the Philippines as the source of English-proficient pilots who can meet the ICAO requirements. “This is another threat we are facing,” he said.
The Geneva-based International Air Transport Association (IATA) said a shortage of highly trained pilots threatens the continuous growth of the global air transport industry, as the industry may need to recruit some 17,000 new pilots annually because of the expected industry growth and retirements.
IATA estimated that by 2011, the number of air passenger will exceed 2.75 billion and the world’s airlines will move 36 million tonnes of air cargo. “That’s 620 million more passengers and 7.5 million more tonnes of cargo than the industry handled in 2006,” the IATA said.
In 2007, the industry is estimated to have experienced a 5.9 percent growth in passenger traffic and 8.4 percent growth in revenues, despite the increase in oil prices which averaged US$73 per barrel last year.
In the Philippines , growth was even more spectacular. Budget carrier Cebu Pacific saw its passenger volume surge 58 percent year-on-year to over 5.49 million passengers in 2007. PAL and its sister firm Air Philippines also reported more than 5 million domestic passengers alone as of December 21, 2007.
PAL is buying six new Boeing 777, to be delivered September 2009. Andrews said PAL would be able to meet its pilot requirements until the completion of its expansion program, as long as there are no more captains leaving the company.
According to Clark Aviation, a British-owned pilot training institute based in Clark Field, Pampanga, the Philippines would be in need of more than 300 new pilots to provide enough coverage for all the new Airbus 320 planes to be delivered to local carriers during the period. Clark Aviation introduced the streamlined multi-crew pilot licence (MPL) training scheme in the country.
The company is currently training 150 cadets from all over the world in Clark on the new MPL scheme, including 65 cadets for Cebu Pacific.
Cebu Pacific plans to expand its fleet of A320/319 to include 29 aircraft, plus the new ATR planes from France that will service Caticlan. The Gokongwei-owned carrier tapped the services of Clark Aviation to undertake an intensive 12-month residential training program for its candidates for pilots.
Cebu Pacific spokesperson Candice Iyog said that because of this partnership with Clark Aviation, “Cebu Pacific does not feel the shortage of pilots at this point.”
The budget carrier, which is now one of the five largest in Asia , currently has 123 pilots in flight operations team and plans to recruit another 100 pilots this year. Iyog said the company offers a competitive compensation and benefit structure in the local market.” Our fun and team-focused culture also keep our employees attuned to stay,” she said.
To enable airlines to meet their pilot requirements, IATA encouraged companies to put more resources in training. “It’s time to ring the warning bell. We must re-think pilot training and qualification to further improve safety and increase training capacity,” said IATA director general and CEO Giovanni Bisignani.
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