IBON’s figure won’t fly

Mathematically impossible was how Malacañang described the recent claims of activist think tank IBON Foundation that the Duterte administration only created 81,000 jobs from 2017 to 2018.

At Davos, Switzerland where the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting is being held, meanwhile, the head of Japan’s central bank warned aging populations threaten to slow economic growth in the world’s advanced economies and destabilize the banking system.

The Philippines is in the midst of a so-called demographic sweet spot in which majority of the population are young and within working age in contrast to most of its neighbors’ relatively old population.

Experts said the country’s sweet spot started in 2015 and would last until 2053.

Bank of Japan Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda said faced with labor shortages as workers age and retire, employers are increasingly willing to hire women and to invest in labor-saving technology.

Thanks to a low birth rate, Japan’s population peaked in 2010. Kuroda said the shortage of workers hobbles economic growth. Slow growth pushes interest rates down and tempts banks to make riskier loans in a search for higher returns, “potentially making the financial system less stable.”

In response to the labor crunch, Japanese firms have been hiring more women. Earlier at the Davos summit, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had boasted that a record 67 percent of Japanese women either work or are looking for work, compared to just over 57 percent in the United States.

Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo disputed IBON’s data by citing figures from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and the Department of Labor and Employment indicating the government generated 826,000 jobs for the country in 2018 alone.

Citing data from the PSA, IBON said the number of employed Filipinos only increased by 162,000 from 41 million in 2016 to 41.2 million in 2018.

According to the foundation, this means the annual job creation reached only 81,000 in the period 2017 to 2018 — the lowest level of jobs created among post-Marcos administrations.

Panelo, however, stressed that “employment rate under the Duterte administration remains ‘very good,’ registering as high as 95.3 percent in October 2016 to a low of 93.4 percent in January 2017 based on the PSA data.

IBON pressed the government “to stop downplaying” the economy’s slow growth and also to stop “hyping it as still among the fastest in the region.”

Panelo, however, questioned how IBON Foundation was able to come up with its figures and implied the research company’s aim releasing its report is to put the President in a bad light.

“One must therefore ask the methodology undertaken by IBON Foundation on how it arrived at its figures on the employment situation in the first two years of the administration,” he said.

Panelo added the foundation is either “inept or just maliciously reckless to degrade the achievements of the President.”