Many nations are still grappling with the deaths and the health problems raised by the COVID-19 as the global death toll surpassed 800,000, with infections rising in Spain, Italy, Germany, in Western Europe, in South Korea in Asia, and in the United Sates, Brazil, and Mexico in the western hemisphere.
In the face of all this bad news, however, many nations are already drawing up plans for the recovery of their battered economies. In the US, that nation’s top merchandising companies are already planning for what they hope to be the nation’s earliest-ever shopping season.
The US has a tradition called Black Friday which began in 2005. A four-day weekend starts with Thanksgiving Day on Thursday and over the years, the next day, Friday, became a special day when the country’s supermalls opened their doors at midnight to hordes of customers taking advantage of the big discounts.
It came to be known as Black Friday because it was a day when retailers began to make big profits, thus turning from being in the red to being in the black in their accounting. It became the beginning of the Christmas shopping season which extends all the way to Christmas Day in December and beyond.
In the last six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with restrictions on the movement of people, US businesses have suffered a great deal and many have had to close down. The pandemic is far from over but the various US states are now reopening and US retailers are now planning to roll out their biggest-ever shopping season even before November’s Black Friday.
Our economic officials in the Philippines are now drawing up our own plans for economic recovery from the last five months of lockdowns when people were told to stay home and offices and businesses were closed down to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said the country slipped into recession with a record 16.5 percent contraction in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the second quarter of the year. This contrasts with the 6 percent GDP expansion last year. Dennis Lapid, director of the BSP’s Department of Economic Research, said the country’s businesses and consumers now need to spend more to revive the economy.
The BSP is doing what it can to push the economy with monetary easing and liquidity injection. But, as BSP Governor Benjamin Diokno said, “Monetary policy is not the only game in town.” Private businesses and the nation’s consumers need to do their part and spend more to revive the economy.
As Metro Manila and the rest of the country rises from the various levels of restrictions in these last six months, they must start planning for the economic recovery of the country. We may not have a massive shopping holiday like Black Friday in the US, but our businesses and our consumers should now be encouraged to make up for all their inactivity of the last five months.