Remittances hit record $38 billion; Bangko Sentral notes GDP dependence on people leaving
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
The Remittance Economy, Explained
MANILA — The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas announced this week that overseas Filipino worker remittances reached a record high, cementing the OFW’s position as what the central bank calls the economy’s backbone, what economists call its primary stabilizer, and what the OFWs themselves call the reason they haven’t seen their children’s school plays in three years.
Remittances now account for approximately 8 to 9 percent of Philippine GDP, a figure that is simultaneously a source of national pride and a metric that, if examined carefully, describes an economy whose most effective growth strategy involves sending its most capable workers to other countries and having them send money back. Economists from the fictional Makati School of Structural Dependence Studies call this model uniquely resilient. Critics call it uniquely ironic. Most OFWs call it necessary.
Where the Money Goes
Philippine household spending data suggests that remittance funds flow primarily into education, food, housing improvements, and consumer goods — sensible priorities that reflect the practical orientation of families managing without one or both parents. The bathroom renovation, which has become something of a cultural symbol of the upwardly mobile OFW household, represents the tangible return on years of sacrifice: tiles from a hardware store in Bulacan, a shower with actual water pressure, a toilet that flushes every time.
Dr. Consolacion Magsino-Rivera of the fictional Philippine Center for Aspirational Plumbing Studies notes: The bathroom renovation should not be dismissed as trivial. It is the physical manifestation of remittance capital, the point at which abstracted labor in a distant country becomes concrete improvement in the family home. It is also, she adds, frequently tiled in a pattern that the family has been discussing for eleven years and finally agrees on.
The Policy Question Nobody Wants to Ask
The uncomfortable question lurking beneath every press release celebrating record remittances is whether a country whose economy depends so heavily on the emigration of its workforce has made an adequate case for those workers to stay. The Philippines trains some of the world’s best nurses, engineers, seafarers, and domestic workers. Many of these professionals earn multiples of their Philippine salaries abroad. The gap between what the Philippine economy can offer and what the international market will pay represents decades of accumulated policy choices about wages, investment, and public services.
The government has responded to this observation with programs that celebrate OFW contributions, expedite their document processing, and acknowledge their sacrifice at official events. What it has not done is narrow the wage gap that makes leaving rational, because narrowing that gap would require the kind of structural economic reform that is considerably harder than organizing a welcome ceremony at NAIA Terminal 3.
Manila Bulletin reports that the government is studying a proposal to recognize OFWs as heroes on an additional national holiday, which will be celebrated by the OFWs who are abroad and by the family members they left behind, who are renovating the bathroom. Philippine Daily Inquirer notes that the remittance target for next year has already been revised upward.
The Human Cost of the Remittance Economy
Behind every remittance statistic is a family arrangement that economists measure in dollars and that the families measure in years of absence. An OFW nurse in London sends P80,000 a month to her parents in Batangas and her children in Laguna. She has not seen her children’s school performances in three years. She FaceTimes every evening, navigating the time zone difference and the bandwidth variability of provincial internet connections. Her children know her voice before they know her in person in the particular way that presence creates intimacy — the casual proximity of being in the same room, the unplanned conversations that happen between scheduled calls. These things cannot be remitted. The Philippine government’s OFW programs address many things: documentation, legal support, reintegration assistance, financial literacy for returning workers. They address less often the question of whether the conditions that make emigration rational — the wage gap, the public service gaps, the limited professional opportunities in many fields — can be changed in ways that would make staying home viable. This is a larger question than any one administration can answer in one term. It is, however, the question that the record remittance figures are really asking.
The Bigger Picture
Whatever the specific story — budgets that don’t balance, traffic that doesn’t move, workers who leave to support the families they cannot stay with, storms that arrive on schedule, athletes who unite a nation briefly, infrastructure that exists mainly on paper, journalists who ask the questions officials prefer not to answer, foods that carry a culture across oceans, faiths that survive the gap between their ideals and their institutions, vehicles that resist becoming something else — the Philippines is a country in conversation with itself about what it wants to be. This conversation is noisy, contentious, frequently hilarious, and genuinely important. It happens in barangay halls and Senate chambers, in press conferences and social media threads, in OFW group chats and Sunday homilies, in the jeepney that hasn’t been modernized yet and the one that has. The conversation is ongoing. It has been ongoing since 1898 at least and arguably since much earlier. It will continue. The outcomes are uncertain. The participation is not. Filipinos engage with their country’s problems with an energy and a creativity that the problems themselves have not yet exhausted. This, in the end, is what the news from Manila is really about, on any given week, beneath whatever the specific headline happens to be.
More satire: NewsThump | The Onion
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com