Chiz Escudero

I urge the government and private corporations to work together to revive the flagging manufacturing industry.

I regret that the country is obsessed with the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. I acknowledged the salutary effects of call centers, but their combined revenue of $2.4 billion accounts for only 2.4 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and their 163,000 employees hardly make a dent on the high unemployment figure.

We lost out first to South Korea, then by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Unless we arrest the decline in the manufacturing industry, we will be overtaken by Vietnam and Cambodia as well.

In its 2007 report, the Asian Development Bank noted that the Philippines, since the 1990s, had seen tens of thousands of plants close down, relegating the country to the bottom of the heap.

The Philippines, being an English speaking country, has a clear advantage over its neighbors. It is estimated that by 2010, the BPO sector will cause the creation of close to 600,000 new jobs. But by then the labor force will have expanded as well, and only by rejuvenating industry, along with agriculture, could the country hope to keep in step with it.

We are the only country in region that speaks the American variety of the English language, and that explains the scramble by US firms to set up call center firms here.

But the problem is that call centers are not knowledge intensive.

Quoting the ADB report, it must be noted that Filipinos working in software development make up for only 13 percent of the BPO sector, in contrast to those of India who constitute a whooping 70 percent.

We can parlay our advantage but we must try to increase our share of workers in knowledge based industry.

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