MALACAÑANG on Friday, January 25, slammed the erroneous report of a research group with regard to the country's employment situation.
Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said it was "mathematically impossible" to claim that the Duterte government only created 81,000 jobs in 2018, as shown in a report released by Ibon Foundation.
Panelo refuted the claim, citing data from both the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and the Department of Labor and Employment, which showed that the government generated 826,000 jobs for the country in 2018 alone.
"Ibon Foundation's claim that the average annual job creation under the Duterte Administration equates to only 81,000 is thus mathematically impossible," he said in a statement on Friday night.
Panelo issued the statement after Ibon Foundation executive director Jose Enrique Africa hit the current administration's supposed "twisted" report on the employment situation in the country.
Africa, in a year-end report released by the research group, said the government's figures on job creation "do not tell the whole story."
"The Duterte administration has actually created just an average of 81,000 jobs annually with 43.5 million jobs in 2018 compared to 43.4 million in 2016. This is because the economy lost a huge 663,000 jobs in 2017, which was the biggest contraction in employment in 20 years or since 1997,” he said.
But Panelo disputed Africa's remarks, noting that employment rate under President Rodrigo Duterte's watch stayed "very good."
"The employment rate under the Duterte administration remains very good registering as high as 95.3 percent in October 2016 to a low of 93.4 percent in January 2017, as per data from the PSA," the Palace official said.
Panelo believed that Ibon Foundation had made public its year-end report to "maliciously" taint the President's achievements.
"One must therefore ask the methodology undertaken by Ibon Foundation on how it arrived at its figures regarding the employment situation in the first two years of the Administration," he said.
"One must also ask if the said foundation is inept or just maliciously reckless to degrade the achievements of the President," he added. (SunStar Philippines)