Arroyo’s Claim of ‘8 Million Jobs Created’ a Statistical Hocus-Pocus

Published on August 11, 2009

BLES defined employment creation as the annual increments in number of employed workers. Mrs. Arroyo said in her Sona speech that the jobs created reached eight million or one million per year. Thus, it means the annual increments from 2001 to 2008.

Applying the NSCB Resolution No. 9 and the BLES-defined employment creation on the period 2001 to 2008, the jobs “created” is only 6.64 million. But Mrs. Arroyo needed eight million. The solution – add the increment in the number of employed for 2009.

For consistency, the BLES should have computed the average estimates for the January and April LFS (the July and October rounds are not yet available) but this will only produce 535,000 jobs and the number needed is at least 1.36 million. To address this, the BLES instead compared the difference between the April 2009 LFS and the April 2008 LFS and found its needed figure – 1.46 million.

So, they arrived at a statistically incoherent eight million jobs – the sum of the annual increments in the average employment results of four LFS rounds per year from 2001 to 2008 plus the increase in the number of employed between the April LFS rounds in 2008 and 2009.

Actually, BLES further statistically distorted the meaning of job creation by simply adding up the increments in the number of employed workers per year. It did not factor in the increase in the number of unemployed, which should have been subtracted from the increase in the number of employed to arrive at “net job creation.” Using this methodology, we will arrive at a smaller job creation figure of around 5.92 million from 2001 to 2008.

These issues are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of government’s systematic efforts to hide job scarcity through flawed methodologies and distorted labor and employment definitions. For instance, we did not discuss yet the kind of jobs supposedly generated since 2001: Are they productive, gainful, secure, etc.?

Government agencies are expected to generate credible and reliable data and statistics to help guide in policy making and development planning. That they are being used to conjure illusions of prosperity only shows the extent of what critics say is the desperation of the Arroyo administration to justify its illegitimate and prolonged rule.

Pages: 1 2