Enhancing the Capabilities of Emigration Countries to Protect Men and Women Destined for Low‐Skilled Employment: The Case of the Philippines

In the Philippines, overseas employment is a phenomenon that has evolved into a national policy which, over the years, has taken many twists and turns as a result of market changes, political developments and public pressure. Government assesses these policies mainly on two dimensions: job generation and foreign exchange remittances. Academe and non government organizations tend to look at these policies from their social costs: fragmented households, single‐parent arrangements and marital break‐ups. Workers look at overseas employment and see the ease or hardship with which they are able to negotiate the process of getting an overseas job and being protected from exploitation. While overseas employment effects such as job generation and remittances are supported by hard data, other policy effects such as social costs, orderliness or fairness are usually measured in terms of perception surveys. This study has attempted to merge available hard data, perception survey and administrative data to evaluate pre‐identified objectives of effective overseas employment policies: orderliness, efficiency and fairness, the availability of good jobs and the ease of transferring overseas earnings. This has been done by establishing a hierarchy of intentions (based on perception, validated by resource allocations) against which composite indicators are correlated. The composite indicators include smaller indicators weighted according to the perception of their importance. The higher the correlation the more effective the policies. The methodology is tedious and difficult, to say the least. Time‐series data are not usually available. Indicators can sometimes be awkward, even inappropriate. The assignment of weights, while based on primary intentions as validated by the budget, still constitute value judgement in the eventual disaggregation. The study hoped to develop an index of efficacy for overseas employment policies. Indices are supposed to be easy to formulate and truly reflective of what is being measured. This study was not easy to formulate and, by that token, probably fails the rule of thumb that an index should be fairly easy to formulate and understand. As with all early efforts, however, this index can stand improvement in both its methodology and its choice of components. Even so, it provides insights and a step forward in the process that hopefully will bring a little more rigor and science in the evaluation of government policies.