Figures that should be at the back, front and center of policy

VERY early this year, with the virus killing people in Wuhan and barely settling in other parts of the planet, I wrote a piece with the headline “Calamitous 2020.” It focused on deaths in Wuhan and the ravages of the African swine fever, which was then busy wiping out farms in the Porac-Angeles-Magalang area in Pampanga — major hog farms with sow levels of 200 (with total populations of 20,000 heads) and farms as big as 1,000 sows (meaning with populations of 100,000 and above).

At that critical juncture, an avian flu strain, the deadly killer of commercial chicken farms, was also reportedly hitting small farms in North Luzon. The three deadly infestations, one on humans, one on hogs and another on fowls, represented a deadly trifecta that might roil the country in so many ways, the column said. A lethal trifecta that might abort the official dream of ushering in a “Golden Age” for a nation that had long dreamed of emerging from its “emergent economy” classification to a status that would bring it closer to a developed economy.

And why not. Wuhan, the center of the virus, was just two connecting flights away and that fast- spreading virus may soon migrate into our unprepared shores, a country with a broken and underfunded health system. Second, if you drag the nonperforming, neglected agriculture sector further into the abyss, that would impact on the growth rate and the employment figures. Plus, the also calamitous earthquakes in Mindanao and the deadly eruption of the Taal Volcano.

Looking at the total landscape now, the fears expressed in that column were truly on the optimistic side, the understatements of the year.

Foreign banks are now looking at an economic contraction of at least 10 percent. This is not the flat growth rate that was the common analysis two months ago. A 10- percent drop in the national output, should it take place, would bring immense pain across all sectors. Other forecasts see a milder contraction at the 3- to 6- percent level. But the optimism that the drop in productivity would just mean a flat growth rate is gone.

That dismal level of output would shrink the revenue base and send the government into a desperate search for funds to fund just its basic health and education programs. The promise of implementing the law on universal health care (UHC), the trailblazing law on a vital safety net, is already in deep peril. And a 10-percent contraction, if that indeed happens, would force the government to defer the UHC implementation. In the time of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) the UHC would serve as the best line of defense against health challenges and issues of citizens.

With dismal revenue collections, the tool kits, software and hardware to transition from face- to- face classes to online education in the public educational sphere will never get adequate funding.

We can scale down the grand infrastructure programs. But we can’t defer the funding of fundamental programs on health and education.

The usual lifelines that the country can rely on during crunch time, the two acronyms of OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) and BPOs (business process outsourcing companies), are a question mark this time. The best case scenario for OFW remittances for this year is a 6.9- percent drop, not the usual over $ 30 billion in remittances. The merchant marine component of the remittances used to be a steadying force, with the Filipino crewmen of overseas cruise liners, from ship captains to waiters and baristas, as one of the big remittance senders. The grounding of the cruise ships has hit hard the Filipino crew, from those doing the Asian tours to those grand ships on the Mediterranean routes.

The seesaw in oil prices, the Covid- 19 eruptions in the Middle East and the general instability of the regimes dependent on oil revenues have put the stability of Middle East deployment of Filipino workers in great danger. The United States, the biggest source of dollar remittances, has recorded unemployment claims that topped the 40- million mark, Filipino- Americans among the casualties of the massive job losses. The Covid- 19 casualties in the US included a long list of Filipino American health workers ( nurses, doctors, caregivers, etc.) which were among the most inspired senders of dollars from the US into the country.

The Philippine BPO partners of the US- based tech unicorns on travel, hospitality and tourism have started to downsize and that meant scaling down their Philippine operations, local “vendors” forced to lay off BPO workers.

The local unemployment rate is now 17.7 percent and this June figure may not improve, even with the efforts to reopen the economy bit by small bit. The government, while it announced the calibrated reopening of the factories and offices in many areas across the country, has failed to provide adequate mass transportation. What kind of economic reopening is it that lacks the component of mobility and safe transport. The country’s de facto mass transport system, the buses, are under still limited and regulated operations, with critical operations linking Metro Manila with the rest of Luzon missing.

On top of the 17.7 percent jobless rate, the expected big drop in OFW remittances and employment, the labor participation rate has dropped to a mere 55 percent- plus, which means that 44 percent of people of working age have dropped out of the labor force — with their return to the employment mainstream a big question mark.

Now, we have the most worrisome figure of all — that 83 percent of Filipinos have reported a decline in their quality of life, are afraid of the future and feel a certain kind of wariness and uncertainty that is worse than at any other point in our contemporary history. The survey taker has a summary of its findings on the state of the Filipino depression: so sad and so historic.

What is the government‘ s plan to ease the pain and reboot the dying economy? The generalized, by- the- book statements from government, this is the truth, add to the national pain and uncertainties. The fact that we have the worst Covid-19 fighting record in this part of the world is truly depressing.