What the Philippines Needs for Inclusive Growth

What will bring about more inclusive growth in the economy? We need more of our economy’s growth to come from sectoral inclusive growth drivers. And to be an effective driver of inclusive growth, an economic sector must meet two important criteria:

One, the sector must be job-rich or labor-intensive. It must employ large numbers of workers, such that growth in the sector will also translate into similar growth in jobs. A sad commentary to the lack of inclusiveness in our 2013 economic growth is the fact that while the economy grew by a hefty 7.2 percent, the number of jobs actually grew by a mere 0.17 percent then.

Two, the sector must have strong and wide interlinkages with the rest of the domestic economy. That is, it must rely on other domestic industries for its inputs such as raw materials and intermediate goods (backward linkages), or its products must find use as inputs by other domestic industries (forward linkages).

Read the entire article by Cielito F. Habito at The Korea Herald.

Photo by Stephanie Azarias & Alexander Olpindo (Wikipedia Takes Manila participant) – Uploaded from Wikipedia Takes Manila via wikimedia.org.

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