Brain Drain: A Crisis in the Philippines

How could we stop this?

         For the past several years, we have seen the Philippines struggle against numerous economic crises that threatened to bring the country down.  And for the past several years, we still have not seen a notable change in the state of the nation’s economic standing.  This now leaves us in a limbo—vulnerable to the effects of these crises which we are supposed to live with, in the foreseeable future.  And one of the biggest problems of the Philippines today is brain drain which is caused primarily by the underemployment, unemployment, and the never-ending economic crisis.

                The Philippines first began experiencing a noticeable brain drain in the 1970s when the government set up a mechanism for international contract work.  These overseas contract workers were at first employed largely in the Middle East, primarily Dubai and Saudi Arabia, but an increasing number of workers were signing contracts in the Southeast, Europe and the Americas.  As of 2006, it was thought that approximately 8 million Filipinos were working abroad.  Philippine workers sent home about $11 million U.S. dollars which is equal to about 12% if the country’s GDP.  But remittances are such hollow solutions to the withering economy as brain drain worsens and affects every industrial sector of the nation.

                The aviation like the Philippine Airlines (the flag carrier of the country) recently lost some 30% of its pilots, most of them poached by airline in Hong Kong, South Korea, the Middle East and even Sri Lanka.  But the salt on the wound was that most of these pilots are trained on wide-body aircrafts like the Boeing 747 and the Airbus S340.  Philippine Airline (PAL) Vice President Captain John Andrews, who is now on standby to fly again due to the scarcity of pilots, contends that, “We can’t expand [the airline’s] capacity because of the uncertainty on the availability of the pilots”.

                Meteorologist, theologists, nurses, doctors among others are now leaving the country in pursuit of more gainful employments with an average of 880,000 people a year.  Economists predict that this would likely get worse before getting better.

                But what is the cause of brain drain?  If we look at it at an economic perspective, one of the factors is underemployment.  Underemployment is primarily the employment of workers with high skills in low level wage jobs that do not require such abilities.  For example, a trained medical doctor working as a taxi driver.  With the alarming rate of the underemployment of the Philippines—21.7% of the whole labor force of 2008 is underemployed, it is no wonder why people who feels that their abilities are undervalued see that going abroad is the way for them to utilize their talents.  But sometimes the true reason is that what they earn now is not enough so that they would risk being underemployed in other countries where they pay higher wages to menial jobs unlike in the Philippines.

                One of the most common reasons why there is brain drain in a third-world country like ours is unemployment.  This is the term used for the insufficient supply of jobs for those who seek to find work.  As of 2000, 11.2% of the labor force is unemployed and this has risen gradually over the years ending with a 20% unemployment rate in the year 2008, most of them coming from the slum areas whose people cannot afford to finance adequate education.  One of the reasons why there is a high unemployment rate in the country is because of the unbalanced occupational distribution and inadequate education attainment or practical skills.  The Philippine population is generally well educated but the critical problem lies in the disparity between worker skills and company needs.

                But perhaps the mother of all the causes that caused brain drain is the various economic problems in the country.  Ever since the millennium dawned, the country has been struggling not to fall but with negligible effect.  This consequence of this is the labor force seeking gainful employment overseas in order to support their family.  It is a given that the overseas remittances plays a big part in making sure that the economy is balanced between abject poverty and struggle, but the country cannot survive on this alone.  It is evident that there is a continuous downslide of the economy and results in a massive brain drain that would eventually cripple us.

                Brain drain is one of the problems our country is facing today but this is something that cannot be solved unless the causes are solved.  We could provide temporary measures but these would not last and we would be facing it yet again, but in a much larger scale.  So the only solution we could do is to solve the root of the problem before we could eliminate the effects of it.

What will happen to the Philippines now?

The face of Brain Drain