Third-quarter economic storm again

I said in one of the titles of my columns last October that gross domestic product (GDP) growth would be lower in the second half. Lower than what? Lower than the GDP of last year’s second half or of the first half of the year. Well, what I really said was that overall the 2011 GDP growth may just be in the lower half of the adjusted GDP growth target of 4.5 percent to 5.5 percent for the year, not more. Given that the GDP grew only by 4 percent in the first half of the year, this means that I was expecting the economy to grow only by 5 percent or less in the second half.

Government GDP data for the third quarter was finally released yesterday. What now? It turns out that the 3.2 percent GDP growth in the third quarter was even worse than the 4 percent average registered in the first half. The fourth quarter may not be good also so that the Aquino government may just be lucky if GDP growth for the full year 2011 will reach the lower limit of its target.

The deceleration, the government’s third-quarter economic report said, was “due to the so-called death spiral of debt that hounds our trading partners, the uninvigorating, albeit already expanded government spending and the decline in fishing due to unfavorable weather and the high cost of fuel.” Other than that, the report did not say much about the cause of the deceleration. It just said that as almost always, the services sector saved the domestic economy from posting an even lower growth. With the downwardly revised second-quarter GDP estimate, this puts the growth for the first nine months of 2011 at 3.6 percent, quite a distance even from the lower end of the whole year target of 4.5 percent.

The demand side, the report also said, was surprisingly very short this time. It says that consumer spending bolstered growth but construction continued to suffer from the much-delayed implementation of the public-private partnership program while export of goods got hit by the global crisis, posting a double-digit decline for the first time since the second quarter of 2009.

With projected population growing by 1.9 percent to 96 million, per capita GDP grew by 1.2 percent overall, the report concluded. Neat but who cares about the 1.2 percent overall increase in per capita GDP if most of that still goes into the hands of the few in the country? In 10 years under Arroyo, the economy grew by more than 4 percent in average but poverty remained high. Now I can still see many new cars being paraded in our streets, but do you know that many people could not even buy a new pair of shoes or sandals a year?

My new German friend, Reiner, wrote to me again. He came to marry Annabel, a girl from Misamis Occidental. He also comes to Cebu City with his wife once in a while. He was the one who told me, the first time he came, that our flyovers was sort of a big attraction to him because he did not see something like it in his country, but that after looking close at it, he did not understand the logic of putting them right in the heart of our city. Another thing that also attracted him was our cemetery. He saw one where the living mixed with the dead for their home. He said he read something about the party-list system. In Misamis Occidental, he asked his neighbors about it but was surprised that they really did not know much about it and that during election they just vote because people gave them money.

Reiner and his new wife are in the city again, and the first thing he witnessed firsthand was a jeepney holdup where the two men took only the rings of the women. One woman screamed because she was hurt when the ring was forcibly pulled from her finger. The scream jolted my friend who was also in the same jeep with his wife. What he told me was that he was surprised that no one inside the jeep tried to help. He tried to help the girl but that his wife signaled him not to. He asked why and I told him that the culprits won’t hesitate to hurt anyone who would try to stop them.

I then advised him not to bring anything unnecessary when going around the city. Then Reiner told me the following experience he had with his wife in Misamis Occidental:

The sister of Annabel’s mother (about 60 years old) was in the hospital in Oroquieta. She needed three blood transfusions. Without money or three donors, she would not get the blood, which means she would move closer to death or die. So four women and two men with me went there. The two men donated blood. The women could not donate because of their weight that was below 50 kg, or because they were having their monthly period.

So they asked me if I could donate. They tested my blood. My blood type was A negative. Then someone approached me and said, “Sorry, sir, we cannot take your blood. There is no Filipino with this type of blood of yours and no foreigner comes in our hospital.” So all the family members collected money until they got P1,800 to pay the third donor.

This hospital was very strange to me. There were no computers; everything was processed by hand. There was no screening of donated blood for AIDS or another illness. In one room, there were about 20 beds with patients in each. They had different illnesses. There were pregnant mothers, newborn babies, patients with broken bones, old and young. Relatives and friends loitered in the room and many stayed overnight. Hard to believe that you have to die if you cannot get someone to donate or purchase blood from. Is this really a Christian country?