Longest lockdown blamed for PH economic meltdown
The Philippines’ imposing the longest and harshest lockdown globally during this pandemic only showed that the “cure was worse than the disease,” said Prof. Eric Soriano during a webinar with the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry and W+B Advisory Group on the topic “Closure is Never an Option: Now is the Time to Turn Your Business Around”.
Soriano said that the case of the matter is that the MSMEs are the hardest hit. MSMEs account for 98.57 percent of all businesses in the country, contribute 40 percent of GDP and 70 percent of workforce.
Soriano, a World Bank/IFC Governance Consultant, also blamed the strict lockdowns for the possible climbing up of the unemployment rate to 25 per cent. He expects the unemployed to shoot up to as much as 20 million Filipinos.
Further, Soriano said that what’s saving the Duterte administration is the low inflation. Despite this, he warned that “what we are currently experiencing is nowhere near what we are experiencing in the next six months.”
