Thursday, October 13, 2016

Philippine Real Wages and Compensation Grew by Less Than 2% in 2015!


This is from the government’s own Current Labor and Statistics Report (Philippine Statistics Authority October 2016) 



Wages page 27 and Compensation index page 37 

NB: I’m only going to discuss the government’s aggregate or overall numbers. I will not deal with the noted categories. 

Based on the average basic pay of wages and salaries for all occupation, the growth rate was LOWER year on year in 2015 at 3.1% than from 2014’s 5.2%. 

Based on the index of compensation per employee in non-agricultural industries, the growth rate for 2015 was only at 2.72%. 

Since the annual CPI for 2015 was at 1.4%, this means that the real wages and compensation grew by just 1.7% and 1.32% only! 

Question: Assuming that the above data have been near accurate, with the massive race to build supply by malls, hotels and real estate and related industries, just how can such indicated wage and compensation growth rates support them? 

Even if those growth numbers would be bloated to 5% they wouldn’t be sufficient to finance the mythical consumer economy. 

This represents one of the inconsistencies with mainstream’s selective statistics cum economics. 

Duterte or no Duterte, the mounting enormous imbalances between supply-side growth and income (demand side) growth are bound to blow up. 

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