It seems stuck with on-again, off-again lockdowns, which are severely damaging to the economy, and will likely create negative expectations for future COVID-19 surges (Figure 2).įigure 2 clarifies how the Philippine government resorted to stricter lockdowns to temper each surge in COVID-19 in the country so far.įigure 2: Community quarantine regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, Philippine National Capital Region (NCR ), March 2020 to June 2021 This seems to be the case for the Philippines, which made global headlines for implementing one of the world’s longest lockdowns during the pandemic, yet failed to flatten its COVID-19 curve.Īt the time of writing, the Philippines is again headed for another hard lockdown and it is still trying to graduate to a more efficient containment strategy amidst rising concerns over the delta variant which has spread across Southeast Asia. However, if a country fails to strengthen these systems, then it squanders the time that lockdown affords it. These are the building blocks of more efficient containment of the disease. Lockdown is useful if it buys a country time to strengthen health systems and test-trace-treat systems. Second, pandemic handling was also problematic. Fortunately, the country’s business process outsourcing (BPO) sector is demonstrating some resilience - yet its main markets have been hit heavily by the pandemic, forcing the sector to rapidly upskill and adjust to emerging opportunities under the new normal.Įdited by Tarun Chhabra, Rush Doshi, Ryan Hass, and Emilie Kimball 2021 International travel plunged, tourism came to a grinding halt, and domestic lockdowns and mobility restrictions crippled the retail sector, restaurants, and hospitality industry.
It is built around the mobility of people, yet tourism, services, and remittances-fed growth are all vulnerable to pandemic-induced lockdowns and consumer confidence decline. How does one of the fastest growing economies in Asia falter? It would be too simplistic to blame this all on the pandemic.įirst, the Philippines’ economic model itself appears more vulnerable to disease outbreak.
The Philippines has relied instead on draconian mobility restrictions across large sections of the country’s key cities and growth hubs every time a COVID-19 surge threatens to overwhelm the country’s health system. The Philippines’ economic growth faltered in 2020 - entering negative territory for the first time since 1999 - and the country experienced one of the deepest contractions in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that year (Figure 1).įigure 1: GDP growth for selected ASEAN countriesĪnd while the government forecasts a slight rebound in 2021, some analysts are concerned over an uncertain and weak recovery, due to the country’s protracted lockdown and inability to shift to a more efficient containment strategy. The rude awakening from the pandemic was that a services- and remittances-led growth model doesn’t do too well in a global disease outbreak.
0 kommentar(er)
