Crafting Coherent Policy Responses to the Crisis in the Philippines

The onslaught of the global economic crisis has thrown many workers in different parts of the world out of their jobs and many in the developing economies have fallen into situations of poverty. In search for the proper response to the crisis, various governments have turned to stimulus spending as a strategy to preserve and create jobs for their affected citizenry. The ILO tripartite constituents – government, workers and employers – designed a Global Jobs Pact (GJP) during the International Labour Conference in 2009. The GJP serves as a guiding framework to national and international policies aimed at stimulating economic recovery, generating jobs and providing protection to working people and their families. It seeks to promote a job-intensive recovery from the crisis. The Pact is built around the principles of the ILO’s Decent Work agenda. It looks at the issues of employment generation and sustainable enterprises. It emphasizes the need for a basic social protection floor. It calls attention to the importance of protecting and promoting rights at work in a crisis situation. It encourages the practice of social dialogue and collective bargaining as critical tools to identify priorities and assist in policy design and implementation. It calls for implementing measures quickly in a coordinated manner, and for integrating gender concerns throughout. The GJP is the response of the ILO and its tripartite constituency to the global crisis. The Pact contains a package of crisis-response and recovery measures. It is not a one-size-fitsall solution, but a portfolio of policy options that countries can adapt to their specific needs and situation. Indeed, a coherent and credible agenda for a rich-job recovery can only result from an in-depth national policy debate and consultation among policy makers and key stakeholders. Since 2001, the Philippines has adopted the Decent Work Common Agenda outlining projects and activities that will help workers, employers and government, achieve the major objectives of Decent Work. The current global crisis could be seen as an opportunity to craft stronger short term and long term responses that can incorporate key elements from the framework of the Global Jobs Pact and help the country restore viable economic growth, employment generation and poverty eradication

The ASEAN Economic Community and the Philippines: Implementation, Outcomes, Impacts, and Ways Forward (Full Report)

As 2015 draws near, assessing ASEAN's progress toward the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) defined by the AEC Blueprint is necessary and instructive. This paper constitutes the Mid-Term Review (MTR) of the AEC Blueprint for the Philippines. The Philippines Country Report presents the results of the surveys related to the MTR on areas including trade liberalization and facilitation, services and investment liberalization, labor mobility, and agriculture. In assessing the progress of implementation of the country's commitments under the AEC, a scorecard mechanism is applied. The report also covers two case studies as well as discussions on the role of the private sector and SMEs, and concludes with recommendations to raise the implementation rate of the AEC measures in the country.Overall, the survey results demonstrate how the AEC and the AEC Blueprint could address some of the issues that have constrained private sector response to the opportunities provided by greater openness in the Philippines, particularly the complex and inefficient administrative processes and procedures, and lack of effective competition in key sectors of the economy. While the Philippines has demonstrated its commitment to the AEC and the AEC Blueprint, key measures still need to be realized, particularly those that relate to services liberalization, customs integration, and ratification of transport protocols and agreements. The analyses of the study have demonstrated the benefits of the accomplishment of AEC measures in the Philippines, particularly those that precisely addressed the key institutional weaknesses faced by the private sector. Further delays in implementation could be costly for the country

Enterprises in the Philippines: Dynamism and Constraints to Employment Growth

This paper seeks to analyze the factors affecting the growth of enterprises in the Philippines, as measured from the expansion of employment. The paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it attempts to provide a comprehensive background of the various policies and legislations that affect firms in the country. Second, using micro-level data of the firms in 2009, we correlate the observed growth of these firms with reported constraints in the business environment within which these firms operate, to investigate which ones are binding constraints. We find significant correlations between a subset of these indicators of business climates and the issues raised in previous literature, and the effects vary across firms of different sizes. Given the challenging global climate in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, more than a third of these firms expanded their payroll and majority saw growth in real sales. Amidst a sea of subjective self-reported responses, we manage to find certain empirical regularities that withstand a battery of robustness checks. These correlations between a subset of indicators for business climates and the growth or expansion of firms may shed some light on future potential policies to assist these firms, as well as provide directions for further research

Fiscal Resources for Inclusive Growth

This paper develops a framework to assess the growth and distribution effects of fiscal resources. Resources are classified as debt, other capital receipts, foreign aid and other unilateral grants, non-tax revenue, including resource rents, seigniorage, and taxes. The framework is used to assess the fiscal resource bases of economies in developing Asia to the extent permitted by available data. Although there is great diversity in the amount of resources raised in terms of the importance of different revenue sources and in the sophistication of revenue administrations, the analysis suggests that in order to expand their relatively low fiscal resource bases, developing Asian economies need to pay greater attention to non-tax revenue and to taxes other than broad-based taxes on income and consumption, such as property taxes and corrective taxes

Realizing an ASEAN Economic Community: Progress and Remaining Challenges

Launched as a political bloc and security pact in the aftermath of the Viet Nam War, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has evolved to embrace an ambitious economic agenda. Its latest project is to establish the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 31 December 2015. Fulfilling these commitments would promote predictability in ASEAN, as well as strengthen its credibility. But is ASEAN likely to meet this deadline? The blueprint for achieving the goal envisages the AEC standing on four pillars and meeting the deadline depends on progress on each of them. Each pillar presents a demanding set of challenges to be met before the AEC can be fully realized. We find that although ASEAN has come a long way toward realizing its goal, the challenges that remain suggest that the AEC will miss its approaching deadline. Accommodating AEC accords will not be easy when they require changes to domestic laws or even the national constitution. The flexibility that characterizes ASEAN cooperation, the celebrated "ASEAN way," may hand member states a convenient pretext for noncompliance. How to enforce the accords remains an issue. If the AEC is to be more than a display of political solidarity, ASEAN must find a way to give the commitments more teeth. The real test for the community, therefore, will lie in the years ahead

Promoting Learning and Industrial Upgrading in ASEAN Countries

This paper traces the effects of the East Asian Miracle, the 1997-1998 Asian Crisis, the recovery, and the 2008-2009 global financial crisis on ASEAN countries. It also considers how ASEAN countries can sustain growth by leveraging production networks to facilitate technology transfer. To achieve this, ASEAN countries need to maintain an environment friendly to foreign investment by resisting corruption, providing consistent and coherent enforcement of laws and regulations at all governmental levels, and maintaining stable macroeconomic fundamentals. This paper then emphasizes that ASEAN countries should focus on climbing the value chain by investing in human capital. They can do this by providing children with adequate nutrition, healthcare, and primary education, providing high school students with a high quality education in science and math, and providing university students with scientific and engineering training. The educational system should also be careful to provide students with marketable skills that businesses need. Finally, the paper argues that ASEAN should promote regional financial integration to help channel savings to high-yielding investments in the region

Engaged, but not immersed: Tracking the mediated public connection of Filipino elite migrants in London

While most of the literature highlights the social, economic and cultural aspects of Filipino migration, this study explores its political dimension by focusing on the public connection of Filipino elite migrants in London. Unlike other types of Filipino migrants, such as Americanized balikbayans and ‘low-skilled’ labour migrants, elite migrants are expected to return physically to the homeland as part of their nationalistic duty to ‘lead the nation’. From their interviews and participant observation, the authors discover that overseas scholars indeed maintain a strong interest in homeland political issues through heavy news consumption on the Internet. However, this has also fostered an ambiguous kind of public connection. On the one hand, elite migrants remain engaged with issues that they hope to address on their eventual return, but on the other hand they are not immersed with ‘other’ Filipino people in the diaspora. Their political engagement involves talk and mediated conversations with limited face-to-face collaborations with other migrants. This kind of public connection lends itself to longdistance particularistic communication and a great volume of discussion, but limited and short-term forms of public activity. The authors argue that elite migrants' practices of political engagement are inscribed in continuing socio-historical – and fundamentally classed – divides in Philippine society. Further, rather than enabling cross-class communications and connections, the media are frequently used by elite migrants to maintain political, economic, social and cultural divides

Agenda for Hope: Sharing Prosperity

Representing a wide range of disciplines, the authors are nonetheless single-minded in their passion for a social transformation that produces a caring, equitable, and productive society with the human person located squarely in the middle. Through their teaching, research, and community outreach, the contributors take pride in sharing the Ateneo\u27s commitment to academic excellence inextricably linked to social justice