Thursday, April 17, 2008 Oledan: Collective value system By Radzini Oledan lice of life
THE extreme reliance on the remittances of migrant workers is a mixed blessing, but while remittances bring in valued foreign exchange, social costs have also become high.
Almost 30 percent of households have at least one member working abroad. Of these households, almost three quarters are entirely dependent on overseas workers.
Study shows that this situation renders most of the migrant members' family unproductive in the local labor force, relying instead on foreign remittance for their own survival.
In most communities, many of the husbands or fathers stopped working once they have family members working abroad. Monthly remittances ranging from P10,000 to P50,000 pesos a month is seen as a substantial sum for an average family.
Since 1970's when the export of labor became an official policy of the government, dependency on the hard currency workers abroad send home became a norm. Today, more than seven million Filipinos have tried their luck in foreign countries, where they work on oil rigs, as nannies and nurses, on construction sites, in factories and other jobs.
For Filipinos, the most common destinations are Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.
Overseas Filipinos sent home more than $8.5 billion last year, putting them third by this measure behind Indians and Mexicans. This amount is larger than the value of the top five Philippine export products and the combined amount of foreign aid and foreign direct investments.
But the price to be paid for this income, experts and government officials say, extends far beyond the economy.
Two-thirds of the Filipinos working abroad are women, official data show, and this migration takes a heavy toll on families. In many cases, fathers are simply unable to manage households and raise children adequately on their own.
Even when migrants return, broken families are often the result. This leads to increasing drug use and drop outs among the children of migrants, government officials said.
While other labor exporting countries face the same situation, the Philippines may be the hardest hit in economic terms because of an unemployment rate which remains to be the highest in the region.
The Asian Development Bank, in its most recent country report on the Philippines, ranked high unemployment as "the country's single clearest indicator of a weak economy."
While remittances have lifted millions of families out of poverty in the short term, question arises on whether this money is slowly destroying the country's ability to develop.
An International Monetary Fund study says "Remittances do not appear to be intended to serve as capital for economic development, but as compensation for poor economic performance," the study said. "If these remittances are used by recipients to reduce their labor supply and labor market participation, then it is possible that economic activity will be adversely affected," it stated.
Several other studies have also concluded that remittances are spent mostly on consumer items like clothes, appliances and cellphones, and sometimes real estate. While some families of overseas workers have tried to invest in businesses, most of these ventures have failed, mainly because they lacked entrepreneurial and managerial skills. Majority though was able to provide decent shelter to their families. E-mail comments to roledan@gmail.com.
