Reaping the demographic dividend may be an uphill climb for the Philippines due to lack of economic prospects brought about by the pandemic, according to Ibon Foundation.
In a news statement, Ibon Foundation’s Contributor Sanny D. Afable said the government must invest in people to boost the country’s chances of repeating an Asian miracle.
Afable said at least a third of the Asian Miracle experienced by South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia was due to reaping the demographic dividend.
“While things are bleak from where things stand at present, the experience of our neighbors tells us that a demographic dividend is possible given the right set of policy choices,” Afable said.
“The Philippine government cannot simply anticipate a demographic dividend without putting in the necessary investments in its greatest resource: the people,” he pointed out.
Afable said East Asian countries that made the Asian miracle possible invested in education and rural development. These governments also instituted wealth-sharing mechanisms that ensured economic growth trickled down to the poor.
The country, Afable said, would do well to learn from these policies to maximize the benefits of having a young population. Having a young population ensures the economy of a steady supply of workers and consumers and is one of the primary factors in reaping the demographic dividend.
The other factors include decent employment opportunities through a steady stream of local and foreign investments, as well as falling fertility rates, which helps reduce the number of dependents in an economy.
“The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic forces us to confront and root out the long-standing population realities. These have all been magnified in what has been a disaster of a year: widespread poverty and hunger, a broken health care and education system, record-high unemployment, and ultimately an economy that is leaving today’s youth and future workers in the lurch,” Afable said. “Unless these structural issues are finally addressed, there will simply be no demographic dividend on the horizon.”
However, Undersecretary for Population and Development Juan Antonio Perez III told the BusinessMirror that reaping the demographic dividend also depends on human behavior, which, he said, is utterly difficult to predict.
Perez said reaping the demographic dividend also rests on the ability of the government to better implement Reproductive Health and Family Planning services.
He added there have been no “societal lockdowns” experienced by the country before which could be used as basis on how Filipinos could react in terms of their family planning practices.
“We have never had societal lockdowns to guide us if people will limit or advance their fertility. What we do know is that family planning has an impact on fertility; that impact is reduced by the pandemic. A second year of lockdowns will set us back another year in the program,” Perez said.
In January, Perez said that the demographic dividend remains achievable by 2025 when about 2/3 of the Philippine population will be of working age.
Perez said that in the last two years, the working age population has been growing by 1 million or more annually. As a percentage of the population, since 2019 the working age population has grown by 1/4 of a percent at 64.02 in 2019, 64.15 in 2020 and 64.28 in 2021.
“POPCOM [Commission on Population and Development] believes that the increase in crude birth rate in 2021 will be a temporary blip in our population development and should resume its downward trend by 2022. Population growth is expected to stabilize at 1.06 percent by 2025,” Perez said.
He said achieving the desired replacement rate means reducing unplanned pregnancies in the country, which make up 30 percent of pregnancies every year.
Perez said the increase in unplanned pregnancies this year could bring it up to 4 out of 10 pregnancies, but this should be a one-year event if we recover steadily from the effects of the pandemic.