Population Management should be mainstreamed in the Philippine Development Agenda

The performance of the Philippine economy has been hindered by the country’s bourgeoning population due to its rapid population growth. For the last decade, the Philippines had the highest annual population growth rates in the Southeast Asian region. In 2009, it has become the second most populous country in the region with a population of more than 92 million, next only to Indonesia. Unfortunately, these have resulted to forgone economic growth, losing the chance to improve the poverty situation in the country. Thus, it is imperative to speed up the demographic transition in the country through proactive government population management policies aimed at harvesting the demographic dividends quickly. By performing simulation analyses on total fertility rate (TFR) under two scenarios, it was shown that the Philippines can hardly experience in the near future the Goldilock period, or the generation when fertility rate is neither too high nor too low, especially when the government does nothing to address the problem. Under the business-as-usual scenario, the Goldilock period will be reached by year 2030, or twenty years from now. In the second scenario where the government intervention targets only the households with unwanted fertility, the Goldilock period will be achieved ten years earlier, or in about 2020.