GNP fans are flying blind

If all that the pilots of the economy see on their dashboards is the Gross National Product (GNP), then they may as well cover them up with a cloth, and look out the window instead.

Work has been radically disrupted by the lack of public transportation. By looking out the window, they would see so many people walking to work, due to the policy-mandated disruption of public transportation.

Thus, people arrive at work semi-exhausted and not as productive as they should be (Fourth Quarter 2020 Social Weather Survey: “42% of non-home-based working Filipinos say going to work is very much harder; 44% of them walk to work,” 5/7/21). As of late 2020, four out of every five workers were leaving home in order to work; only one of the five could work from home.

In addition, millions of workers are periodically stranded by halts to inter-island transportation and checkpoints on inter-provincial road traffic.

The schooling system has been radically disrupted. The people’s future productivity depends very much on the quality of their education, which in turn has been disrupted by policy-mandated changes in the schooling system (“Schooling in COVID-time,” inquirer.net, 3/20/21). The majority of families with enrolled school-age members say that “blended learning” does not teach their children as well as face-to-face, teacher-to-student, learning.

Access to distance learning is extremely unequal. Only three-fifths of families have a device for distance learning. Only two-fifths of families in online distance learning have a strong internet connection. And one-eighth of Filipinos of school-age are not enrolled in school.

Economic suffering has hit new records all over the country. Poverty, hunger, and joblessness all reached new levels not seen in 30 years of surveys, inducing SWS to adopt “catastrophic” as a new adjective—a 50+ percentage point excess of those that got worse off over those that got better off. Poverty now afflicts one-half of Filipino families, and another one-third feel they are on the poverty borderline (“Surveys of suffering,” inquirer.net, 10/10/20).

But government statistics are blind to the obvious suffering. Official poverty figures still go back to 2018. Their schedule for updating calls for two surveys of family income and expenditures this year, one in each semester—implying that the 2021 poverty situation will be officially known only in 2022, i.e., in time for the next administration. The government’s food situation surveys in 2020 looked for a COVID-19 connection in 9 provinces/cities, but didn’t find any (“The ‘food-insecurity’ emergency,” inquirer.net, 5/8/21).

The economic suffering is crystallized, meaning its dimensions are interrelated. In my opinion, it relates to the policy-inflicted disruptions of the daily life of the people in general, rather than to the pattern of infections from COVID-19.

With the fear of infection being universal, the Filipino people have been cooperating with the health protocols reasonably well. But the government is not looking scientifically into how much economic suffering to the general public is caused by, compared to how much physical suffering to patients and health frontliners is saved by, its constantly adjusting quarantines. And don’t forget that quarantines have side effects on mental health, too (“Filipinos stressed by the COVID-19 crisis remains high at 86%,” 10/8/20).

Cash transfers (“ayuda”) helped a bit, but only enough for one or two months of sustenance (“69% of Filipino families received money-help from the government, 7% from the private sector, since the COVID-19 crisis started,” 1/21/21).

To track the people’s welfare, use SDGs, not GNP. The first five of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals are: No. 1. End poverty; No. 2. Zero hunger; No. 3. Good health and well-being; No. 4. Quality education; and No. 5. Gender equality. GNP only enters the picture as part of SDG No. 8: Decent work and economic growth.

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