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  • Writer: Ziggurat Realestatecorp
    Ziggurat Realestatecorp
  • Apr 23, 2023
  • 6 min read

The pandemic may have waned, but its economic impact continues to reverberate on the nation’s streets.


Three years ago, Allain Rodriguez sold balut (boiled or steamed fertilized duck egg) on Mabini Street, behind the San Sebastian Church in Tarlac, a city some 130 kilometers away from the Philippine capital Manila. Even with a lot of fellow street vendors selling the iconic Filipino street food, he still managed to make a living.


Since then, a lot of things have changed for the 47-year-old. The most obvious was the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which wreaked havoc with his livelihood as lockdowns forced Filipinos out of the streets and in to their homes.


“The situation was really tough when the pandemic happened,” Rodriguez said in rough but jolly Tagalog as he handed out a plastic bag of balut to a customer.


He sighed as he looked out at the lively scene of Francisco Tanedo street, a place that is known to Tarlaquenos as a hotspot for businesses. “This place is going back to normal now, but during the pandemic it was so deserted that I didn’t know whether I would be able to come back to sell balut,” he said.


He added that this is the only livelihood that’s feasible for him: “I had to endure it even if the earnings got hit when the pandemic started. I had a family to take care of.”


A stone’s throw away from Rodriguez’ stall, Aminnah Sabtula, a 46-year-old Muslim woman, sells racks of clothes at a makeshift stand. She only does this on weekends, so her earnings are low, but during the pandemic she was forced to stay home entirely. “No one was buying clothes from me during that time,” she said with a smile as she straightened her hijab, waiting patiently for customers to show up.


Street vendors and peddlers make up a large portion of the Philippines’ informal economy, a nearly countless number of independent and small-scale businesses that distribute products, goods, and services outside the large economic establishments run by the government and the private sector. Globally, the informal economy makes up more than half of the workforce and dominates the world’s micro and small enterprises. The World Economics website calculates that the Philippines’ informal economy is worth approximately $470 billion, making up a significant 34.1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.


However, these huge numbers do not translate into wealth for most vendors. According to Salary Expert, a typical street vendor in the Philippines currently earns around 279,928 Philippine pesos ($5,133) per year, or 134 pesos ($2.46) per hour, although this figure varies considerably from location to location.


In reality, despite the numbers and the tempting possibility of six-digit annual earnings, the informal economy comprises a huge diversity of jobs and activities that are not tracked regularly, if ever. In contrast with well-established conglomerates and companies, as well as government-sourced jobs and regular jobs with clear rules of recruitment, agreement, and responsibilities, jobs at informal enterprises are mostly (but not always) characterized by a lack of regulation from government inspectors, and based only on verbal agreements and understandings.


They also tend to be characterized by untidy and dangerous working conditions, irregular wages for workers, and a lack of coverage by government laws and labor regulations. Thus, while the informal sector contributes as much to Philippines’ economy as the formal sector, it presents many risks to those who rely on it.


Aside from street vendors, the Philippines’ informal economy also includes people such as small-scale farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, fisherfolk, cobblers, street food hawkers, junkyard collectors, jeepney barkers, cigarette sellers, etc. Street vendors like Rodriguez and Sabtula sell not only cooked eggs and clothes but also other items such as fruits and vegetables, second-hand smartphones, hair products, cigarettes, candies, perfume, etc.


It is not unusual to see street vendors loitering along the crowded streets of the Philippines’ cities. These vendors may work from a fixed location such as a kiosk or sidewalk table, or they may be mobile. Given their ready visibility in the streets, street vendors and market porters provide necessary goods and services, especially to those who must buy life’s necessities in small quantities at affordable prices. They help provide nutrition and other basic goods and services for a wide swath of the population that cannot afford to shop at modern supermarkets or department stores.


In response to concerns about congestion, as well as the presence of illegal activity in the informal economy, some local government units (LGUs) have tried to restrict street vendors through local city ordinances. Zoning ordinances also restrict vendors to select locations that are sometimes inconvenient to both the vendors and their usual customers.


However, zoning policies and regulations differ widely between LGUs. When, where, and how vendors work usually depends on the views of the incumbent local official, which can differ starkly from place to place. In many cities, street vendors are forced to pay bribes to the authorities in order to work.


During the COVID-19 pandemic, street vendors were barred from the streets after a nationwide lockdown was implemented in an attempt to stem the spread of the deadly virus. But the move threatened not only the livelihoods of those involved in the underground economy but also the very survival of informal vendors and their families in some places.


It was also during the pandemic that the government allocated an emergency fund of some 200 billion pesos (around $3.57 billion) to 18 million needy Filipinos. They are still eligible for a monthly assistance of 5,000 to 8,000 pesos (roughly $89 to $143).


However, the so-called cash transfer program has been marred by allegations of corruption, and Sabtula said that she did not receive even a single cent from the local government.


Three years after the implementation of the lockdown, the country is easing restrictions. Both Rodriguez and Sabtula said that they are still barely making ends meet, but at the same time, they said that it is better than earning nothing.


Rodriguez recalled the time prior to COVID-19, when it was easy and profitable to sell his products not only in Mabini Street but in other parts of Tarlac City. “Before the pandemic happened, all the balut eggs provided by our distributor were quickly sold out,” he said, while counting his earnings. “Competition is very hard that time because you have to deal not only with competitors who sell the same products but also with law enforcers who sometimes close down the stalls. Even then, I manage to sell almost all of my products in a week and earning is good enough.”


He also added that to prevent losing more customers in the past, he did not change the price of the balut eggs despite some of his competitors doing so. “Even my fellow vendors would get angry at me at times for not changing my prices. Maybe it’s because of competition or genuine concern for me,” he said with a laugh.


Similarly, Sabtula has not changed her prices, and there were even times during the pandemic when she had to lower the prices just to satisfy the few remaining customers that were willing to buy directly from her residence. “Right now, the situation’s already going back to normal and I am relieved for it because during the pandemic, I was always worrying where I would get money to feed my kids,” she said.


According to Ditte Fallesen, a social development expert for the Danish Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, the COVID-19 pandemic had had a serious effect on livelihoods in the Philippines, especially those in poor communities. In an article that she published on a World Bank blog in November 2021, she listed jobs in the informal sector as having been affected the most by the pandemic. Aside from street vendors, owners of sari-sari kiosks, laundry women, hairdressers and barbers, and workers at small food canteen businesses all experienced significant work and income losses.


Even prior to COVID-19, efforts to integrate street vendors to the formal economy have been lackluster. For instance, former Manila Mayor Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso made cleanliness one of his campaign promises back when he first ran for office. But while he made good on his promise to cleanse the streets of Manila of street peddlers, there was no clear plan from Domagoso or from other Manila officials on how to deal with street vendors and other informal workers, which comprise more than 70 percent of total employment in the capital.


There were also plans by incumbent Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte to relocate all the displaced vendors to a public market, but it was also disclosed that it would take two years for the new marketplace to be constructed. This meant that street vendors have had either to find other sources of income for two years or that they have to move out of the National Capital Region to find somewhere to conduct their business.


While there has been no official announcement about the end of the pandemic, cases remain low. But under the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who took office last year, little progress has been made to help street vendors and other sectors of the informal economy get back on their feet. Current Manila Mayor Honey Lacuna signed a local executive order stating that street vendors are no longer allowed to put up stalls in specific areas, while a lawmaker recently filed a bill penalizing vendors who erect stalls on the sidewalks in an effort to minimize danger.


As Rodriguez handed over his last balut egg for the day, the afternoon sun slowly disappearing in the west, he said, “I still consider myself lucky that I was able to get back to work.”


He then sat down on the pavement and stretched his legs. “I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years,” he said. “I just hope I can survive in this business for the next few years.”


Source: The Diplomat and picture Credit: Flickr/Burgermac

  • Writer: Ziggurat Realestatecorp
    Ziggurat Realestatecorp
  • May 3, 2022
  • 3 min read

The COVID-19 pandemic in the last two years has gone through multiple phases in the Philippines and its impact is still unfolding. The magnitude of disruptions in jobs and livelihoods due to lockdown measures as well as government social protection

responses have varied across time. In the same period, the country experienced natural disasters including Typhoon Odette, which triggered the declaration of a state of calamity and underscored the importance of an adaptive social protection (SP)

response.


This note describes the phases of the COVID-19 SP response in the Philippines and assesses the performance with a focus on social assistance (SA).

We provide estimates of the coverage, adequacy, targeting accuracy, timeliness, and payment delivery of COVID-19 social assistance in the Philippines

based on several household surveys and studies. We pay special attention to the Philippines’ flagship social protection program, the Pantawid Pamilyang

Pilipino Program (4Ps), and the COVID-19 emergency cash assistance program, the Social Amelioration Program (SAP). Salient findings are summarized as

follows:

Overall SA coverage was very high during the pandemic. In the first half of 2020, 96 percent of Filipino households reported receiving some form of social assistance. The most common forms of assistance were local relief (mainly food aid distributed by local government units or LGUs).

SAP also reached a high share of households— close to 60 percent of households based on a nationwide survey—and about 23 million beneficiaries based on administrative data.

• Despite the large coverage of SA programs, their ability to mitigate the negative impact of the pandemic was modest. Timely support provided to 4Ps beneficiaries helped them cope with the shock better. Delivery of cash assistance to beneficiaries beyond 4Ps was challenging due to weak delivery systems. The overall impact of SA was modest given the magnitude of the shock and the prolonged pandemic as well as the required amount and timeliness of assistance.

Food insecurity rose sharply, and many households were forced to employ negative coping strategies. Household employment rebounded as economic activities gradually resumed when quarantine restrictions were relaxed, but recovery of household incomes was much slower. A significant increase in the poverty rates is expected.

• The targeting accuracy of social assistance programs varied greatly. 4Ps continued to be relatively well targeted, though targeting accuracy continued to decline. SAP also demonstrated progressivity in targeting. Other programs were not as well-targeted and, in some cases, regressive. While food aid reached households faster than cash due to the country’s well established relief mechanism developed to cope with frequent natural disasters, it was not well targeted, the monetary value was small, and it was also costly to deliver.

• SAP payments were delivered through three different channels: cash cards for current 4Ps beneficiaries, physical delivery by LGU officials, and banks and e-money issuers. This indicates that the government-to-person (G2P) payment mechanisms in the country have mixed levels of development. The initial attempt at large scale digital payments using banks and e-money issuers for the second tranche of SAP presented both current challenges and future opportunities for leapfrogging the country’s G2P mechanisms.


The experience provides some important lessons.


First, it is critical to have well-established SP policies, programs, and systems upon which emergency operations can be built.

Second, SP delivery systems require regular updates and modernization investment and efforts.

Third, digital tools and technological advances should be actively used for SP delivery. Fourth, timely and agile policy adaptations building on the lessons learned from each shock can help strengthen overall SP systems and delivery for future resilience.


The note proposes the following priorities for adaptive and resilient SP program delivery: adoption of the national ID system for SP delivery; enhancement of

the targeting system; development of digital platforms and tools; continued innovation in digital G2P payments; strengthening of contingency financing mechanisms and readiness for disaster response; and shift of resources from in-kind to cash assistance


Source: Worldbank

  • Writer: Ziggurat Realestatecorp
    Ziggurat Realestatecorp
  • Apr 3, 2022
  • 3 min read

“I haven’t been to my office now for several months.” “When I go to my office it’s only for a meeting.” “My office is my dining table.” Are the offices so many of us worked in for decades becoming an extinct space? Will we still need office buildings? What offices will be around after covid-19 has been conquered? The Economist recently said “many offices were being run as relics of the 20th century […] the covid calamity will prompt a long-overdue phase of technological and social experimentation, neither business as usual nor a fatal blow to the office.”


The word office comes to us from the Latin word officium which means ‘performance of a task’. Etymology says the Latin word was contracted from opificium, literally ‘work-doing’. A person holding on office, an officer, has a responsibility, a duty to perform. The Uffizi Gallery was initially built in 1560 for Cosimo I de’ Medici to house Florence’s administrative and legal offices (uffizi in old Italian). The tasks in the Uffizi involved intellectual labour, white-collar work.


Offices in both senses of this word are side effects of organisations. The spatial sense of office that eventually evolved to uffizi probably began with the invention of writing over 5,000 years ago as high priests of early empires organised and accounted for the production of wealth.


In Organizations, published in 1958, James March and Nobelist Herbert Simon say the set of rules for performing a task is a programme. Two conditions underly and are implicit in the idea of office: 1) how firmly or strongly tasks can be differentiated and classified; 2) how thoroughly a task can be programmed and communicated.

What will be gained are efficiency and effectiveness. Lost will be the social functions of the office

Two generations ago, it became apparent that the hierarchical integration of the previous generation’s organisation had to loosen up. And it did. Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch in their classic Organization and Environment five decades ago addressed the problem of differentiating and integrating an organisation’s elements to make it successful. They showed horizontal integration was as important as its vertical counterpart. It was about then that the open office plan (Burolandschaft, i.e. office landscape) came into being in Germany and the Herman Miller Company began creating furniture for the more flexibly arranged open office. It didn’t hurt that the cost of this movable furniture could be amortised faster than traditional fixed office walls and doors.


Programmes have long been and still are communicated face-to-face in real space. The great benefit of spatial offices is that it enables face-to-face communication and transactions when subjective intent must be verbally elaborated and made explicit. The Coase Theorem says that firms, work organisations, exist to reduce transaction costs which would be higher and require legal apparatus when outside an organisation’s boundaries. Spatial offices integrating an organisation’s parts reduce mutual uncertainties and the transaction costs of intellectual exchange. As writing shifted from cuneiform to sheepskin, papyrus, paper and eventually to digital electronic media, many programmes could become more accurate, elaborated, finely differentiated, explicit, efficiently coded and communicated.


It’s undeniable that the programming of tasks has improved geometrically over recent decades while at the same time task classifications have had to become much looser. Two reasons: one, a constantly shifting competitive environment; two, we individually have more say in where we fit in the division of labour. Almost every layer of a hierarchy can be deconstructed into parts located almost anywhere.


The quantitative contraction of traditional office space is long overdue, happening and will continue. What will be gained are efficiency and effectiveness. Lost will be the social functions of the office as many office workers, excepting those in high managerial positions of large organisations, start-ups and professional firms, will be spatially segregated from each other. Tall office buildings will likely be places reserved for those in high managerial positions. Others may be converted to residential use or places where interior spaces need interconnection, like museums.


The processes of spatial redistribution won’t take place overnight. The big unknown is how they will affect metropolitan life. It will be a mistake for developers and designers to act on and affect spatial patterns based only on anticipations of market behaviour. Technological and social experimentation using the vehicle of real estate could easily and misguidedly fix what’s not broke. A period of benign neglect is necessary.


© Copyright 2018 by Ziggurat Real Estate Corp. All Rights Reserved.

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