Alvin
May 27th, 2005, 04:26 PM
interesting article.
Will Indonesia Overtake The Philippines?
Updated:2005-05-26 14:20:43 MYT
I was at Singapore's Changi Airport (not to greet the First Gentleman) recently when a woman approached me, apparently confused. She showed me her boarding card and asked a question in Bahasa Indonesia.
I caught the word "di mana" ("where" in Indonesian) and figured she was asking for instructions. Actually she was the second Indonesian that morning to approach me for help to get to her boarding gate.
I was waiting, too, for my own flight to Yogyakarta, but I realised there were quite a few flights going out of Singapore to various Indonesian cities.
I did get the Indonesian women to their gates and from my elementary Bahasa Indonesia, I found out that they were working in Singapore as domestic helpers.
On my plane to Yogyakarta, from the shopping bags they had and their excited conversations, I estimated that at least half of the plane was filled with Indonesian helpers returning home.
The airport encounters brought a sense of déja vu to me. A few years back, I dreaded taking planes leaving Manila with lots of domestic helpers. Even before the plane would take off, I'd hear sobbing all around me, from young Filipinos being deployed abroad. Sometimes I'd hold my tears back as well, feeling the sense of helplessness they had.
I remember one Muslim Filipino who was carrying a little shoulder bag. As we landed in Kuala Lumpur, which was where we she was going to work, I asked her if she knew where to get her baggage. She looked at me incredulously, and pointed to her carry-on: "Ito na." [This is it.]
At foreign airports, I'd also have Filipinos approaching me, like the Indonesians, to ask for help around the airport. Again, I remember one Filipino who didn't know she had to take a connecting flight to her final destination. I had to instruct her to check the airport's clocks so she wouldn't miss her flight because she didn't have a watch of her own.
Thankfully, flights returning to Manila were joyous events, marked by animated conversations and carefree laughter. When the plane landed, there was wild applause from the returning workers.
These days I sense our overseas workers have become jaded. Working overseas has become so much a part of our life, and the collective experiences have made our workers airport-wise, street-wise, world-wise.
You see Filipinos strutting around confidently in groups, lugging duty-free goods. And when the planes land in Manila, it's rare now to hear applause. It's almost as if Filipinos are unhappy to be returning home.
Meanwhile, the Indonesians have slowly been moving in to get their share of the global labour market, especially for domestic workers.
There are now more than two million Indonesian overseas workers, almost half of them deployed in Malaysia while the others are found in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and Singapore.
Filipinos probably still have an edge in some of these markets because we speak better English. (I was, in fact, surprised with the Indonesian women at Singapore's airport. I would have thought that after working in Singapore, they'd be able to speak in English.)
But we shouldn't think our familiarity with English will keep us ahead. In fact, in some circumstances, Indonesians may be preferred over Filipinos. Employers in the Middle East aren't too particular about English skills and prefer getting Muslim domestic helpers, and Indonesia provides a ready source.
But even in Hong Kong and Singapore, there's a growing demand for Indonesians, partly because they're perceived to be more docile and are willing to work for lower wages. That's global capitalism for you.
Besides the overseas workers sector, I do wonder if Indonesia will eventually overtake us in terms of economic development.
Among the original ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) members - Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia - we've lagged behind all the other countries, except Indonesia, somehow keeping a notch ahead of it.
But Indonesia has been surging forward, threatening to overtake us. I've visited Indonesia many times over the last 20 years and in the 1990s, I was amazed at their infrastructure and social development programs.
Indonesia was also adversely affected by Asian flu in 1997, but that might have been for the better: that crisis exposed weaknesses in the system brought about by corruption and cronyism. Even today, Indonesia remains hobbled by corruption - in Transparency International's corruption index, we rank 102nd in the world while Indonesia ranked 133rd, almost at the bottom of the list.
I looked up some statistics in the UN's Human Development Report and found Indonesia has a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of USD3,230 while the Philippines' is USD4,170. In terms of the Human Development Index, which aggregates economic and social development indicators, we rank 83rd while Indonesia ranks 111th.
But my sense is that Indonesia is moving faster than we are. They do have the advantage of being an oil-producing country and having many natural resources. We boast of 7,100 islands and a land area of 300,000 sq km, but Indonesia has 13,000 islands (okay, so like here, many disappear with high tide) spread out over 1.9 million sq km.
Indonesians have a strong manufacturing sector. If you haven't noticed it yet, a lot of the glassware sold here now come from Indonesia and they're also now exporting wooden furniture to the Philippines. Some Indonesian companies have even become multinationals. One of these giants holds considerable shares in the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co (and Smart Communications).
Population has been a problem for Indonesia, which now has 220 million people, many of them crammed into the island of Java (where major cities like Jakarta and Yogyakarta are located). An ambitious government transmigration program many years ago helped to disperse the population to other islands, but mainly it's been a family planning program that has helped Indonesia to move forward.
Their annual population growth rate in 2000 was 1.4% while the Philippines' is more than 2.0%. The family planning program played an important role in helping Indonesia fight poverty. Today, while 37% of Filipinos live below the poverty line, in Indonesia the figure is 27.1%.
In 1975, the difference between the Human Development Index of Indonesia and the Philippines was 0.186. By 2004, this had been reduced to 0.061. The Indonesians are racing ahead but rather than thinking of all this as one big competition, we should look for ways of working together, learning from each other's experiences in fighting corruption and promoting human development.
By Michael L Tan
Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN
Will Indonesia Overtake The Philippines?
Updated:2005-05-26 14:20:43 MYT
I was at Singapore's Changi Airport (not to greet the First Gentleman) recently when a woman approached me, apparently confused. She showed me her boarding card and asked a question in Bahasa Indonesia.
I caught the word "di mana" ("where" in Indonesian) and figured she was asking for instructions. Actually she was the second Indonesian that morning to approach me for help to get to her boarding gate.
I was waiting, too, for my own flight to Yogyakarta, but I realised there were quite a few flights going out of Singapore to various Indonesian cities.
I did get the Indonesian women to their gates and from my elementary Bahasa Indonesia, I found out that they were working in Singapore as domestic helpers.
On my plane to Yogyakarta, from the shopping bags they had and their excited conversations, I estimated that at least half of the plane was filled with Indonesian helpers returning home.
The airport encounters brought a sense of déja vu to me. A few years back, I dreaded taking planes leaving Manila with lots of domestic helpers. Even before the plane would take off, I'd hear sobbing all around me, from young Filipinos being deployed abroad. Sometimes I'd hold my tears back as well, feeling the sense of helplessness they had.
I remember one Muslim Filipino who was carrying a little shoulder bag. As we landed in Kuala Lumpur, which was where we she was going to work, I asked her if she knew where to get her baggage. She looked at me incredulously, and pointed to her carry-on: "Ito na." [This is it.]
At foreign airports, I'd also have Filipinos approaching me, like the Indonesians, to ask for help around the airport. Again, I remember one Filipino who didn't know she had to take a connecting flight to her final destination. I had to instruct her to check the airport's clocks so she wouldn't miss her flight because she didn't have a watch of her own.
Thankfully, flights returning to Manila were joyous events, marked by animated conversations and carefree laughter. When the plane landed, there was wild applause from the returning workers.
These days I sense our overseas workers have become jaded. Working overseas has become so much a part of our life, and the collective experiences have made our workers airport-wise, street-wise, world-wise.
You see Filipinos strutting around confidently in groups, lugging duty-free goods. And when the planes land in Manila, it's rare now to hear applause. It's almost as if Filipinos are unhappy to be returning home.
Meanwhile, the Indonesians have slowly been moving in to get their share of the global labour market, especially for domestic workers.
There are now more than two million Indonesian overseas workers, almost half of them deployed in Malaysia while the others are found in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and Singapore.
Filipinos probably still have an edge in some of these markets because we speak better English. (I was, in fact, surprised with the Indonesian women at Singapore's airport. I would have thought that after working in Singapore, they'd be able to speak in English.)
But we shouldn't think our familiarity with English will keep us ahead. In fact, in some circumstances, Indonesians may be preferred over Filipinos. Employers in the Middle East aren't too particular about English skills and prefer getting Muslim domestic helpers, and Indonesia provides a ready source.
But even in Hong Kong and Singapore, there's a growing demand for Indonesians, partly because they're perceived to be more docile and are willing to work for lower wages. That's global capitalism for you.
Besides the overseas workers sector, I do wonder if Indonesia will eventually overtake us in terms of economic development.
Among the original ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) members - Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia - we've lagged behind all the other countries, except Indonesia, somehow keeping a notch ahead of it.
But Indonesia has been surging forward, threatening to overtake us. I've visited Indonesia many times over the last 20 years and in the 1990s, I was amazed at their infrastructure and social development programs.
Indonesia was also adversely affected by Asian flu in 1997, but that might have been for the better: that crisis exposed weaknesses in the system brought about by corruption and cronyism. Even today, Indonesia remains hobbled by corruption - in Transparency International's corruption index, we rank 102nd in the world while Indonesia ranked 133rd, almost at the bottom of the list.
I looked up some statistics in the UN's Human Development Report and found Indonesia has a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of USD3,230 while the Philippines' is USD4,170. In terms of the Human Development Index, which aggregates economic and social development indicators, we rank 83rd while Indonesia ranks 111th.
But my sense is that Indonesia is moving faster than we are. They do have the advantage of being an oil-producing country and having many natural resources. We boast of 7,100 islands and a land area of 300,000 sq km, but Indonesia has 13,000 islands (okay, so like here, many disappear with high tide) spread out over 1.9 million sq km.
Indonesians have a strong manufacturing sector. If you haven't noticed it yet, a lot of the glassware sold here now come from Indonesia and they're also now exporting wooden furniture to the Philippines. Some Indonesian companies have even become multinationals. One of these giants holds considerable shares in the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co (and Smart Communications).
Population has been a problem for Indonesia, which now has 220 million people, many of them crammed into the island of Java (where major cities like Jakarta and Yogyakarta are located). An ambitious government transmigration program many years ago helped to disperse the population to other islands, but mainly it's been a family planning program that has helped Indonesia to move forward.
Their annual population growth rate in 2000 was 1.4% while the Philippines' is more than 2.0%. The family planning program played an important role in helping Indonesia fight poverty. Today, while 37% of Filipinos live below the poverty line, in Indonesia the figure is 27.1%.
In 1975, the difference between the Human Development Index of Indonesia and the Philippines was 0.186. By 2004, this had been reduced to 0.061. The Indonesians are racing ahead but rather than thinking of all this as one big competition, we should look for ways of working together, learning from each other's experiences in fighting corruption and promoting human development.
By Michael L Tan
Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN