Enterprises in the Philippines: Dynamism and Constraints to Employment Growth

This paper seeks to analyze the factors affecting the growth of enterprises in the Philippines, as measured from the expansion of employment. The paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it attempts to provide a comprehensive background of the various policies and legislations that affect firms in the country. Second, using micro-level data of the firms in 2009, we correlate the observed growth of these firms with reported constraints in the business environment within which these firms operate, to investigate which ones are binding constraints. We find significant correlations between a subset of these indicators of business climates and the issues raised in previous literature, and the effects vary across firms of different sizes. Given the challenging global climate in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, more than a third of these firms expanded their payroll and majority saw growth in real sales. Amidst a sea of subjective self-reported responses, we manage to find certain empirical regularities that withstand a battery of robustness checks. These correlations between a subset of indicators for business climates and the growth or expansion of firms may shed some light on future potential policies to assist these firms, as well as provide directions for further research.