For the economy to recover this year, an economist has proposed that the government should relax and unify its mobility rules to enable activities on travel, tourism and labor.
Rafael Garchitorena, chief strategist and co-head of research at Regis Partners Inc., asked the government to ease its movement regulations so as to give the people some breathing space to travel around the country. He argued such a policy will benefit an economy that has sunk into recession due to the Covid-19 lockdowns.
“I think the absolutely critical to getting the economy going is to relax mobility restrictions,” Garchitorena said in a webinar on Tuesday.
“If you look at it from a pure economic standpoint, if you can ignore for a moment the potential impact on Covid spreading, that is huge, even just allowing domestic travel between provinces. I don’t even think we are fully operating all the provincial buses out of Metro Manila,” he added.
Based on Regis estimates, 64 percent of public jeepneys and 75 percent of the public-utility van UV Express have returned to ply their intended routes again.
However, the operations of public buses and Light Rail Transit 1 (LRT 1) have remained static throughout the second half of last year. As of November 2020, only 38 percent of buses made their way back to the streets, from 31 percent in July, while LRT 1’s capacity has stayed put at the 31 percent level.
Likewise, Garchitorena scored the government, from the national to the provincial and local, for their failure to come up with unified rules on travel.
He said it’s not helping neither the tourism sector nor the localities when different provinces ask for different requirements in entering their jurisdictions. Last week, the Department of Tourism announced tourism revenues declined by as much as 83 percent to P81.4 billion last year, from P482.16 billion in 2019, due to travel restrictions put in place by the government.
“You need to find out what the different restrictions are per province depending on where you are going,” Garchitorena added.
On top of this, the Regis economist backed calls of the business sector to allow schools to resume face-to-face classes the soonest. He said this will give parents the breathing space to leave their house to do work, as the blended learning method keeps some of them at home to guide their children in doing tasks.
“For many of these children, the parents have to stay home to help them with school, particularly the local public schools where there is no online schooling,” Garchitorena said.
Government economists and business groups have been asking policy-makers to remove most of the Covid-19 restrictions to permit industries to return to their pre-pandemic operations. They said doing so will give the economy a chance to recover after bleeding losses on all fronts, from output to exports to employment, last year.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes