Last week the Arroyo administration began placing full-page and double-spread colored advertisements touting its achievements in the economy, social development, infrastructure, jobs, agriculture, energy and digital infrastructure.

The big ads must be costing taxpayers a considerable amount of money. (A colored double spread costs about P660,000.) Not content with this, Conrado Limcaoco, head of the Philippine Information Agency, urged other government offices to bear part of the burden of placing ads highlighting the ?legacy? of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

It is curious that the Arroyo administration is now advertising its claimed achievements in its ?last two minutes.? It looks like it is a propaganda effort for Ms Arroyo who is running for representative of the second district of Pampanga, and for the administration?s presidential candidate, Gilberto Teodoro. There is no attempt to conceal the not-so-subliminal ploy to highlight Teodoro?s initials GT in the heads??Ganito Tayo Noon-Ganito Tayo Ngayon.?

Lawyer Ernesto Francisco, who last year went to court to question the use of public funds to advertise the programs of the President, the Vice President and Cabinet members, is again questioning the PIA ad placements. He said that the current ad placements constitute illegal disbursement of funds, especially now that Ms Arroyo is running for representative. He said it constitutes illegal campaigning (it is not yet the campaign period), it is also an illegal disbursement because Ms Arroyo is using government funds and resources to promote her candidacy.

The advertisements do not portray the real social and economic picture of the nation. For instance, there is no mention of the fact that in the last quarter of 2009, the proportion of families who experienced involuntary hunger reached a new record high of 24 percent or an estimated 4.4 million households. This came out in the Social Weather Stations survey conducted last Dec. 5 to 10.

The survey also found that 46 percent (estimated 8.5 million) families consider themselves ?mahirap? or poor and 39 percent (estimated 7.1 million) consider themselves food-poor. How can we say that the nation achieved economic progress during Ms Arroyo?s nine-year administration when one out of four households experience involuntary hunger and nearly one-half of all families consider themselves poor?

The picture of job creation does not look good, either. In 2001 Ms Arroyo promised to create one million jobs every year. Based on the labor department and statistics office?s computation of eight million jobs for the past eight years, she has achieved this. But while the numbers look good, the quality of the labor market is in question. The data counted among the ?employed? workers who worked even for just an hour and those with jobs and were on vacation or waiting for business to start.

Moreover, Ms Arroyo set another target for job creation in 2004: 10 million jobs for her 2004 to 2010 term. Since then, her administration has created only 4.9 million jobs in the domestic market, or less than half of the target.

The PIA ad says 100,000 new classrooms were built during Ms Arroyo?s term. But former Education Undersecretary Juan Miguel Luz, who is working with the National Institute of Policy Study, said the schools are still 27,124 classrooms short. At the rate of 50 students per classroom, that means that about 1.35 million students have to attend classes in makeshift constructions and probably even under the trees.

Former Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Cayetano Paderanga said last July that growth over the past decade has been service-oriented and consumption-led. ?There?s a glaring absence of investments and exports, the traditional engines of economic takeoff,? he said.

He added: ?In contrast to the almost unexpected rise in OFW remittances, the emergence of these two impulses for economic growth would have been traceable to strategic and pivotal government policies and programs. Unfortunately, this has been largely missing.?

The economy has been kept floating largely by the OFW remittances, not by programs undertaken by the administration. But the administration?s propaganda contained in the expensive ads would have us believe that the nation has experienced tremendous growth during the last nine years.