IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jdevst/v36y2000i4p149-181.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The structure of employment and structural adjustment in the Philippines

Author

Listed:
  • Joseph Lim
  • Manuel Montes

Abstract

Growth in the 1970s seemed, at that time, to have brought the Philippines to a rather high equilibrium growth path. But the foreign debt and political crisis in the early and mid-1980s had brought the economy down to a lower equilibrium path. The recovery years (1987 to 1990) did not prove to be sustainable, given the extreme debt overhang, so that the economy retreated once again to the lower equilibrium path in the early 1990s. Significant debt reduction schemes and the new inflows (remittances of overseas workers and rising foreign investments) allowed a new growth trend. Whether sufficient growth can be maintained in the medium and long term will depend to a large part on uncontrollable external conditions. Significant improvements in trade and industrial policies are needed so that external deficits and imports will finance those sectors that allow for creation of high quality employment. Policy will have to shift resources away from the trade, real estate and other service sectors to strong tradeable manufactures. If the Philippines cannot get out of the boom—bust cycle, labour productivity in the medium and long term will stagnate and the share of those employed in the total labour force will remain stable, leading to stagnating employment opportunities and worsening income distribution.

Suggested Citation

  • Joseph Lim & Manuel Montes, 2000. "The structure of employment and structural adjustment in the Philippines," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(4), pages 149-181.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:36:y:2000:i:4:p:149-181
    DOI: 10.1080/00220380008422641
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220380008422641
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00220380008422641?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Felipe, Jesus & Estrada, Gemma & Lanzafame, Matteo, 2022. "The turnaround in Philippine growth: From disappointment to promising success," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 327-342.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:36:y:2000:i:4:p:149-181. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/FJDS20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.