More jobs should accompany higher growth - Villar

Growth of the job market should accompany any Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, so the latter can be felt by those who pin their hopes on the improving economy to better their lives, Senate President Manny Villar, president of the Nacionalista Party, said.

While conceding the two-decade high 7.5 percent GDP expansion in the second quarter is "impressive," Villar said, "An increase in employment should complete the picture."

"A jobless growth," he warned, "would blot out and reduce the impact of any GDP growth." "For the man on the street, more jobs and lower or stable prices of basic goods are signs of the good times," Villar said.

"The challenge, therefore, is to translate upward economic movement to the expansion of the labor market," he said.

Second quarter's economic performance captured only a month, or for April, of the job picture for the period.

Reported unemployment rate for that month was 7.4 percent while underemployment, which some say constitutes "hidden unemployment," was a high of 18.9 percent.

But critics have claimed said that joblessness could be higher as the new government formula in counting the unemployed excludes those who have given up on job searching among the unemployed column.

Still, in real terms, 2.691 million were without jobs and 6.381 million were working part-time whose pay presumably was not enough to eke out a decent living when the last survey was taken, Villar said.

Villar said, "It is this army of nine million unemployed and semi-employed who should benefit from the rosy economic picture which the government is painting."

"They should be the bellwether if indeed growth is trickling down or we are just being tricked into believing that there is," Villar said.

By region, NCR registered the highest unemployment rate at 12.5 percent, followed by Central Luzon with 10.2 percent.

The most disturbing aspect of the job picture is that half of the total unemployed belonged to the 15 to 24 age group.

Four out of 10 unemployed persons had attended college, "meaning, higher education is no longer a passport to assured employment," Villar said.