INFLATION IN PHILIPPINES

This article is intended for school assignment.  What are the causes of inflation and how to battle inflation?  Written below are the basic answers to inflation:

Inflation is the general increase in the price of goods, commodities and services that makes the purchasing power of the currency is falling.  As of today, the inflation in the Philippines is the highest among ASEAN neighboring countries.  Some of the basic reasons of inflation are the world oil process, rice shortage, weak peso, calamities and people’s behavior.

Definitely the oil price in the world market greatly affects our economy.  Philippines is dependent in importing oil.  We import oil from Middle East countries.  Our industries, transportation, and trading will not function without it.  While this can be controlled, natural calamities like typhoon, landslides, earthquakes and floods are difficult to handle, the same with people’s behavior.

In this day we do not have source of oil.  Every family’s responsibility is to help our country to get rid of from extreme dependency in importing oil.  As of now we cannot avoid it, but we can control it.  Let us really do our share to save electricity and energy.  Our population now is more than 100 million.  99% of this is composed of household families.  The remaining are the orphanage, hospitals, military camps and diplomatic quarters.  From this alone, it is clear that the household families are the number one dependent of electricity.  If every family will help to reduce their electricity consumes, that will be a very big impact on our need as a nation.

To combat inflation, we should invest in products and services to generate money.  Yes the remittance of the Overseas Filipino Workers plays big role in managing our money but this is the right time to look for a long-term solution like uplifting the resources we have.  We are agricultural country.  We have so many resources to dwell.  We should utilize the idle agricultural land to become productive by enriching and stimulating the farming industry.  Help our farmers by giving them the support they need like giving them lesser or smaller taxes.  Let us encourage the local government in the rural areas to invest in farming.  We should grow our own foods.  If our rural areas can produce more crops, we can be not only rice or onion sufficient but also export them.   And maybe we need to have “Agricultural Cooperatives” instead of having the middle men in marketing the products to avoid hoarding and imposing high prices.   Invest in rural area by generating agricultural and livestock business.

Let us control and study the distribution of land into industrial and residential land.  If our government can introduce the new design of government’s housing projects to limit the land size like apartment type upward designs instead of widening design.    Basically, our land becomes smaller due to rapid growth of population.  This is the main reason why even the mountain and the riverside are being occupied by informal settlers.  If these lands will become community, we will run out of place for planting our crops.

Another thing that we should improve is our mentality towards inflation.  Most of us are using inflation to gain or to become selfish.   When we know there is expected rise of inflation in the coming days, people are in panic buying mode while businessmen are either changing their price list to secure their profits or hoarding goods for higher profit later.  When media announced that oil companies will hike gasoline and diesel prices tomorrow, the consumers will race to the gasoline station to full tank their motors.