Trump 2.0 seen as a win for Philippines real estate

The country’s real estate industry is expected to benefit and flourish further under a Donald Trump presidency, according to integrated real estate services company Santos Knight Frank.

In a press briefing, Santos Knight Frank chairman and CEO Rick Santos said that Trump’s win would benefit the Philippine real estate sector.

“President Trump is a businessman. He’s a real estate guy, so we think that will be positive,” Santos said.

“He’s very much into real estate. So I couldn’t think of a better person to help the Philippine real estate sector and business of the Philippines than probably one of the most high-profile real estate individuals and personalities anywhere,” he said.

At present, Santos said the Philippine real estate sector is riding on a wave of opportunities driven by proactive measures from the current administration to open the country further to investments.

He said that the Marcos administration’s CREATE MORE Act, in particular, promotes investment-friendly policies designed to stimulate business growth and demand for real estate.

“These efforts are creating a more dynamic and business-friendly environment, paving the way for sustained development and progress,” Santos said.

“Momentum in the market remains strong, particularly in the residential segment, where Manila has once again secured the top spot in Knight Frank’s Prime Global Cities Index. Demand continues to drive price growth in this sector, fueled by limited supply,” he said.

He said a Trump presidency would be a win for the Philippines, with potentially limited downside.

“There’s always good. There’s always bad. But I’m very optimistic,” he said.

According to Santos, Philippine-US relations will be positive for strategic and business purposes.

He said that Trump’s global trade policies, combined with the recently signed CREATE MORE law, will significantly influence the country’s industrial and manufacturing sectors.

“From a strategic level, the Trump administration and the people he has appointed are taking a strong stance to support the treaty ally and the long US-Philippine relationship. That’s going to be positive for the Philippines from a strategic, defense, trading and business perspective,” Santos said.

“We think the Trump administration will continue to be good for Philippine business. Also, from a US-Philippine perspective, we have never seen US-Philippine relations so good, so strong, so important and so relevant,” he said.

Source: Philstar

PH to miss income status goal

Economic growth will likely fall short of official targets for this year and the next, a government-owned think tank said, delaying the Philippines' bid to hit upper middle-income status by 2025.

"[The] outlook on Philippine GDP (gross domestic product) growth remains volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and disruptive (VUCAD) as indicators remain conditioned on economic policies to be implemented by global powers and how responsive the economy would be," the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) said in a November discussion paper.

Lower-than-expected third-quarter GDP growth of 5.2 percent has put this year's 6.0- to 7.0-percent goal at risk. As of end-September, growth was below target at 5.8 percent — a 6.6-percent fourth-quarter expansion will be needed to hit the lower end of 6.0 percent.

The PIDS said that October-December growth could pick up to 6.0 percent, driven by "continued government spending on infrastructure development but hampered by the damages of recent natural calamities."

While higher than the previous quarter, full-year growth will fall between 5.8 percent and 6.0 percent, it added.

Moreover, 2025 growth is expected to also fall below the 6.5- to 7.5-percent target at 6.1 percent. Easing inflation and policy rates that will reinforce both consumption and investment activities of the private and public sectors were seen as driving the expansion.

"While the Philippines continued above-expectation results in the first half of 2024 at 6.1 percent... it remained short of the required growth for the Philippines to be escalated to an upper middle-income economy by 2025," the think tank noted.

The goal can be achieved by late next year or early in 2026 " if the economy can grow as much as 8.0 percent with an exchange rate not depreciating much beyond the PHP/USD 58.00 mark," the PIDS said.

Hiking gross national income (GNI) will be crucial to achieving the income status goal, and the think tank said that "by sustaining at least a six to seven percent GDP growth, accompanied by continued growth in net factor income from abroad through remittances and overseas investment income, GNI can increase alongside the current decline in average annual population growth rate."

The country's GNI per capita rose to $4,230 in 2023, up from $3,950 in 2022. This is still within the lower-middle income range of $1,146 to $4,515, which was updated from the $1,136 to $4,465 level set last year.

To achieve upper-middle income status, GNI per capita has to hit $4,516 to $14,005, also now higher than the previous range of $4,466 to $13,845.

Economic managers are still optimistic about hitting the income status by the end of next year, stressing that a nominal growth of 10 percent should take the country there.

Nominal GDP growth, which is not adjusted for inflation, was reported at 8.8 percent as of March 2024, lower than the 9.28 percent recorded in December 2023.

Significant headwinds to growth will persist into next year, the PIDS said, with the key risks being a global economic slowdown, inflationary pressures, currency volatility, rapid climate change, political and governance issues, skills mismatches and other labor issues, and geopolitical tensions.

To address this, it recommended that households improve their financial resilience, private firms adapt to a VUCAD economy and the government work on promoting economic stability and resilience via effective policy directions.

Source: Manila Times

Shrinking Family Sizes May Change Our Experience with Aging

Throughout the world, the number of relatives that people have may dramatically shrink by 2095, which could change care for children and aging people

For many families, extended relatives are a core part of caregiving. Grandparents, aunts and uncles can help parents look after young children. In turn, siblings and cousins may help care for aging parents. But the availability of such support—which many cultures have depended on for millennia—is quickly dwindling: a new study predicts extended families around the world will keep getting smaller as people live longer and have fewer children.

Using international demographic data, researchers recently projected the structure of families in every country around the world. They estimated that, globally, a woman who is 65 years old in 2095 will have only 25 living relatives. That represents a nearly two-fifths reduction from an estimated total of 41 relatives in 1950—and a nearly 42 percent reduction from an estimated total of about 43 relatives in 2023, according to the researchers. These estimates suggest that more people, especially in lower-income countries, will face a steadily increasing burden of caring for older people and children as intergenerational support disappears. The findings, which also note a pressing need for more formal care systems or institutions, were published in December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Projections of Human Kinship for All Countries,” by Diego Alburez-Gutierrez et al., in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 120, No. 52; December 19, 2023

Understanding changing family structures is an urgent matter in many countries that lack effective social security or other institutional support systems, says Sha Jiang, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. Instead societies often have to rely on families to support the most vulnerable people in their population, such as older people. “So this raises an important issue,” Jiang says. “Will there be enough family members to take care of those [older people]? Or do we put too much burden at the family level?”

Researchers can analyze long-term data trends to answer these questions. Demographers look particularly at a phenomenon called the demographic transition: a shift away from high birth and death rates. Many analyses show this is currently causing the world’s population to skew older. But how this change specifically affects extended families and their composition has received less attention, says the new study’s lead author Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, a social scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany.

In their analysis, Alburez-Gutierrez and his colleagues made three major predictions about family structures, also called kinship networks. First, extended family size will likely decrease over time. Second, the composition of families will narrow: Alburez-Gutierrez explains that people will have fewer close-aged relatives in their own generation, such as siblings and cousins, and more ancestors, such as grandparents and great-grandparents. Third, age gaps between generations will grow as people increasingly have children later in life.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Projections of Human Kinship for All Countries,” by Diego Alburez-Gutierrez et al., in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 120, No. 52; December 19, 2023

Forecasting patterns like this on a global scale “wouldn’t have been possible five years ago,” says Ashton Verdery, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist and demographer, who was not involved in the study. Many past demographic studies have focused on the nuclear family (defined as two parents and their children) because most readily available data measure changes within individual households. Methods that quantify changes in the number of cousins, aunts, uncles, niblings (a term for nieces and nephews) and other extended family greatly advanced in the past decade. “It’s a fantastic application of newly developed methods,” Verdery says.

The study foreshadows potentially drastic problems for health care. The findings suggest extended families may shrink very quickly in countries that are just beginning to see lower birth and death rates, such as those in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Most of these countries currently don’t have systems in place to care for a growing aging population and will likely struggle with the rapid change, Alburez-Gutierrez says. Much more of the medical, financial and emotional burden may fall on a single person instead of being spread out over multiple family members. This would put additional stress on those who are lower-income and stretched for time.

Some countries that already have low birth and death rates are facing these issues today. In China familial-based care is still considered the norm, Verdery says. But as the country undergoes mass aging, and the availability of caregivers dwindles there, people are often “sandwiched” between taking care of their kids, as well as their own parents and grandparents. Some face increasing financial stress as they pay for older adults’ care, in addition to supporting their own children. Others, notably many women, often drop out of the labor force to invest more time in caring for their family, Verdery says. Smaller extended families also mean some members may become increasingly isolated socially and could struggle with loneliness.

Alburez-Gutierrez notes that this new analysis does not include adoptive families and LGBTQ+ families. “People can make a family in many other ways,” he says. But current data and modeling tools are limited in their ability to quantify these family networks, as well as other sources of support, such as friends or other community members.

Strategies that address an aging population also may be useful when it comes to supporting smaller families, Alburez-Gutierrez adds. These might include extending health care coverage for aging adults, restructuring pension systems and investing in affordable child care infrastructure. Initiatives in some countries are also building more multigenerational housing to make it easier for older adults to live with their children, Verdery says. Other countries have found creative ways of using existing community structures to foster social connectedness. France, for example, launched a program a few years ago where postal workers can make check-ins on older residents as they deliver mail along their routes. Community support organizations can also help adults navigate difficult logistical, financial and emotional challenges of long-term care.

Families are very relevant when it comes to understanding population health, especially outside the Global North, Alburez-Gutierrez says. Societies have been built around the expectation that supportive family networks will always exist, he says, “but that is going to change in the near future.”

Source: Scientific American