Economic crisis:
Statistics on crisis

Basahin ang artikulong ito sa Pilipino

The Macapagal-Arroyo regime suffered a series of blows in the last half of last year. Macapagal-Arroyo was hard-pressed painting a rosy picture of the economy in the face of statistics starkly highlighting the worsening crisis in the Philippines:

Reduced foreign investments. Only P4.7 billion in investments came in during the third quarter of 2002. This represents an 81% decrease from last year's P25 billion level. Only portfolio investments increased, amounting to $692 million (January-September 2002), up from $208 million in 2001. Portfolio investments are geared only towards the purchase of government bonds � financial instruments that enable government to borrow from the public � and have no bearing on production or economic growth.

Unemployment. Unemployment grew to 10.2% from 9.8% last year. From July to October, more than 243,000 workers were laid off and could not find work. Conservative government estimates place the number of unemployed at 3.5 million. Another 4.6 million, on the other hand, are underemployed. Due to reduced foreign investments, only 17,000 news jobs were created by foreign companies, 37% lower compared to the 27,000 new jobs created last year.

Meanwhile, regular and contractual workers continue to be laid off due to a slump in production. Macapagal-Arroyo's plan of providing "one million jobs" has been shown to be an utter failure as it was revealed that only 60,000 new jobs were created in the agriculture sector.

Budget deficit. Estimates place the budget deficit for 2003 at P223 billion due to insufficient government income. This is 65% higher than the previous target of P130 billion.

Ballooning debts. Government debts continue to swell as interest payments increase. As of the latest calculation, government debts amount to P3.26 trillion (inclusive of the P535 billion guaranteed loans of private companies under the build-operatetransfer scheme), 17% higher than last year's figure. Paying the yearly minimum debt service of P411 billion alone is enough to cause the budget deficit to balloon in the next three to four years.

January 2003
English Edition

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