The demographic dividend that will speed up the country’s growth rate will only be realized if there are enough jobs to match the growing working-age population, the World Bank said.
In a report titled “Global Monitoring Report 2015/2016: Development Goals in an Era of Demographic Change,” the World Bank said the Philippines is considered an early-dividend country due to the huge number of working-age Filipinos. “Pre- and early-dividend countries also face the challenge of creating enough jobs for the growing working-age population share and in investing sufficiently in raising their skill levels,” the report stated.
The World Bank estimated that the country’s labor force is expected to post an average growth of 2.4 percent between 2015 and 2030.
The growth of the Filipino work force will be supported by the increase in total fertility of 2.87 percent between 2015 and 2020.
This fertility-rate level, however, is lower than the 4.53 percent registered in the 1985-to-1990 period.
With the growth of the population, the per-capita growth of the bottom 40 percent was at 1.15 percent between 2006 and 2012. The annual growth per capita of the total population was only 0.41 percent.
“More than 90 percent of poverty is concentrated in pre- and early-dividend countries, with swelling working-age populations that lag in key human-development indicators and continue to register rapid population growth,” the report stated. “In these countries, the demographic transition to lower fertility creates a golden opportunity to raise living standards.”
In the results of the July Labor Force Survey, around 66.61 million Filipinos are 15 to 64 years old and considered part of the labor force.
The country’s labor-force participation rate was 62.9 percent. Of this portion of working-age Filipinos, those who are employed account for 93.5 percent and the unemployed account for 6.5 percent.
Of the employed, the underemployed accounted for 21 percent. Underemployed Filipinos are employed persons who express the desire to have additional hours of work in their present job, or to have additional job, or to have a new job with longer working hours.
The Calabarzon region is home to 8.62 million working-age Filipinos, the highest concentration of workers nationwide. The lowest number of workers were registered in the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) at 1.19 million.
In terms of labor force participation rate, the highest was recorded in CAR at 66.5 percent, while the lowest labor force participation rate was recorded in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao at 53.3 percent.
The highest employment rate was posted by Cagayan Valley at 96.6 percent, while the lowest employment rate was in Central Luzon with 91.2 percent.
The highest unemployment rate was in Central Luzon with 8.8 percent, while the lowest unemployment rate was in Cagayan Valley, 3.4 percent.
The region with the highest underemployment rate was Bicol with 33.8 percent and the region with the lowest underemployment was the National Capital Region with 9.8 percent.