GOVERNANCE MATTERS
Former Vice President Jejomar Binay
Over the weekend, the government placed Metro Manila and four adjacent provinces, what the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) refers to as NCR Plus, under Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) status - a softer, benign term for a hard lockdown – for a period of one week.
The declaration is a bitter pill for government, as it has been insisting that returning to a hard lockdown was not only unnecessary but potentially ruinous to the economy. But it had no option. The uncontrolled increase in the number of infections is already straining, once again, the capacity of hospitals to handle the surge.
The hard lockdown settles, once and for all, the back and forth between senior government officials and experts on what triggered the surge. Clearly, it validated the position that the government opened the economy prematurely, without having upgraded its capability to trace and test more than a year after it imposed the longest lockdown in the world. Warnings about a new strain would have prompted a reimposition of border controls. But it responded in the same manner as when news of the outbreak in Wuhan, China began to spread and mainland Chinese tourists were arriving in record numbers. Government did not act immediately.
Government is now obligated to provide some form of economic relief to citizens who will be affected by the shuttering of enterprises. Again, government had firmly maintained it would not extend another round of cash assistance, referred to as “ayuda,” since it prefers people to go back to work.
But even as it declared that P2,000 in “ayuda" will be forthcoming for displaced workers, government has yet to discuss the details. It would be futile to expect the release of the “ayuda" next week, if one considers the disappointing track record of government in efficiency.
What does this return to a hard lockdown mean for the economy? In December last year, the World Bank was optimistic that the economy would be able to recover in two years as a result of its decision to allow the opening of businesses.
This would help ease poverty, which the agency estimated as having “pushed into poverty” some 2.7 million Filipinos.
But on the same day the government announced the hard lockdown, media reported an unusually sharp and direct statement from the World Bank blaming the country’s poor economic prospects on government’s over-reliance on “prolonged lockdowns rather than prioritizing mass testing” even as other economies in the region are already recovering.
Said a World Bank official: “The Philippines relied more on prolonged restrictions on mobility rather than an effective test-based strategy.”
“Countries with greater quarterly growth contraction in 2020 had higher infection rates, imposed more stringent mobility restrictions, had more highly indebted governments and were more dependent on earnings from tourism,” World Bank added.
How important is testing? Countries that tested more individuals registered higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to World Bank data. Vietnam conducted 4,277 tests per confirmed case, followed by Laos (2,080), China (1,853), Cambodia (897) and Malaysia (244). The Philippines conducted only 17 tests per confirmed case.
“Because of mass testing, mobility restrictions were not as severe, resulting in gross domestic product growth for Vietnam (2.9 percent), China (2.3 percent) and Laos (0.4 percent) in 2020. Cambodia’s GDP also contracted, but only by 3.1 percent, and Malaysia by 5.6 percent,” the agency said.
“The Philippine economy, on the other hand, shrank 9.5 percent, its worst in several decades and the sharpest drop in the region,” it added.
Our current predicament is unsettling for citizens who have grown tired of restrictions on their movements, the absence of economic relief, a bleak future, and government’s ineptitude. It is frustrating for public health, governance, and economic experts who have been prodding government to upgrade its testing and tracing capabilities for the past year.
Government opted to ignore these suggestions, often dismissing them as politicking. Will it dismiss the World Bank’s prognosis as yet another example of politicking? Or will it finally listen?