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AFTER a record unemployment rate at the height of pandemic-induced lockdowns, Filipinos should expect more job opportunities at the opening of next year, as more companies indicated their willingness to start increasing their job size in the first quarter of 2021.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), in its quarterly survey of expectations and business confidence, reported that more companies indicated better employment plans and prospects for January to March this year.
In particular, the job outlook index returned to positive territory for the first quarter of 2021 at 5.3 percent. This is a -5.5 percent turnaround in the previous round of the survey.
Over the next 12 months, the job outlook index reached 7.8 percent from -2.1 percent, indicating an upward trend in business confidence to hire people in the coming months.
The confidence index is calculated as the percentage of optimistic companies minus the percentage of pessimistic companies about the employment prospects.
Likewise, the percentage of companies with expansion plans in the industrial sector increased to 16.9 percent for the first quarter of 2021 from 11 percent in the previous survey round.
Over the next 12 months, the expansion confidence index reached 28 percent from 20.4 percent in the previous survey.
The BSP said that the percentage of companies expressing expansion plans for the next quarter and the next 12 months increased in all subsectors of the industry except the agriculture, fisheries and forestry subsector, which decreased.
When asked about risks that could hamper their increased confidence for the coming months, companies identified insufficient demand resulting in low sales volume and strong competition, as indicated by 45.6 percent and 36 percent. , 7 percent of the total number of respondents, respectively.
The BSP also said that the majority of respondents specified, as their additional business limitation, the continuing adverse effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The latest data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed that the country’s unemployment rate reached 8.7 percent in October.
