Phil. Migration and Development Statistical Almanac - Limitations of the Data in this Statistical Almanac

You are here: Home

Home

Limitations of the Data in this Statistical Almanac

Thursday, 18 December 2008

International migration statistics in the Philippines are not perfect—a fact that data-crunchers in the government agencies that develop such data have themselves admitted. The Philippines has tried its best to develop the best possible set of international migration statistics amid observations that capturing and generating such statistics from a population process called international migration is difficult.

Statistics presented in this Migration and Development Statistical Almanac all the more have their limitations.

Data and data capturing limitations

Reliability of the base data in computing the stock estimates on overseas Filipinos. While the government, in particular the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, produces annual stock estimates on overseas Filipinos, having a reliable base data remains a challenge. CFO uses the formula below to compute the stock estimates of all overseas Filipinos, and wishes that this formula be modified in future estimations:

Ap = Bt + Ct..p – Dt..p

where

Ap – the overseas Filipino population at time P;

Bt – the stock of Filipinos abroad as of time T;

Ct..p – the total outflow of migrant Filipinos to the Philippines since time T until time P; and

Dt..p – the total return flow of migrant Filipinos to the Philippines since time T until time P

Double counting of migrants is a real statistical challenge, especially on the part of returning temporary migrants who wish to work overseas again—whether to the initial destination country or to a new country.
Like many countries, the Philippines does not have comprehensive and accurate data on returning migrants. What return migration-related data that this Statistical Almanac contains are data on re-hired temporary migrant workers (the first time this dataset is made publicly available), and data on overseas Filipinos as tourists. Many stakeholders have clamored that the Bureau of Immigration and Deportation be involved in the international migration statistical system since departing and returning migrants are filling up embarkation and disembarkation cards.
Some agencies do not have available data on some demographic variables on the migrants they process prior to their overseas migration. For example, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration does not have available data on overseas workers civil status and educational attainment (even if the raw data are available within POEA). This is where the forms of agencies such as POEA and CFO need to be improved to capture the other missing data better.
Agencies are still discussing the definitions to be used in the international migration statistical system. The major contention here rests on who are overseas Filipinos vis-à-vis the type of overseas migration by Filipinos. At the same time, Philippine authorities on international migration statistics are trying to configure Philippine-context definitions with definitions by the United Nations Population Division. The same concern also goes with remittances: what the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) usually releases are cash remittances, while what the International Monetary Fund estimates are remittances of all types.
Remittances data also have some discrepancies that are a result of various countries’ financial infrastructure and systems. For example, people should not easily think that the volume of remittances from some 2.5 million Filipinos in the United States entirely come from the US. Saudi Arabia-originated remittances had to be cleared in US financial clearinghouses before reaching the Philippines, as some of those remittances originally coming from the one million Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia are recorded as remittances coming from the United States. Another example is Libya, where there are nearly 10,000 Filipinos. Remittances recorded from Libya are only in thousand US dollars but remittances coming from neighboring Tunisia, which only has less than 250 Filipinos, have reached millions. Filipinos there say they have to go to neighboring Tunisia by land to send money home. Users of this Almanac looking at Philippine remittances data should take note of these circumstances.
What remains to be discussed also are the types of migrants to be counted. In demography, a person is counted if he or she is still part of a country as a resident. In the case of overseas migration, temporary migrants are still counted because they are still Filipino citizens even if they have been out of the country for a considerable amount of time. But permanent migrants are not anymore counted in the Philippines since they have been residents of host countries already. This is even if permanent migrants contribute substantially to the Philippines through remittances and other resources. Some academics even observe that international migration distorts concepts such as “residency” and “citizenship”—to the point that demography has yet to address such intricacies of international human mobility.
Another limitation is the caution to easily compare various datasets on overseas Filipinos per variable using the various data sources. For example, it is easily discomforting to compare the 8.7 million stock estimates on overseas Filipinos produced by CFO to the 1.1 million deployed overseas workers in a year (POEA data), the 80,000-plus registered permanent residents (CFO), and the estimated 1.7 million overseas Filipinos according to the Survey on Overseas Filipinos (National Statistics Office). Instead of comparing one dataset to the other, this Statistical Almanac looked at the trends that can be seen from these datasets as regards a specific variable (e.g. age, sex structure, civil status, among others). The user of this Almanac should also understand the limitations of data-capturing methods such as the Survey on Overseas Filipinos, the Family Income and Expenditures Survey, and the Labor Force Survey in aspects such as sample size, weighting factor, and even the areas unreached by these statistical agencies due to various geographic and resource limitations.

Limitations brought about by international migration itself

Data presented here are those coming from government agencies, recording the overseas migration of Filipinos who pass through their registries. But there are other data that are simply difficult to capture.

The most difficult data to capture are irregular or undocumented migrants, simply because these migrants are in hiding and are eluding identification that may lead to their possible deportation. Even world experts have yet to design a statistically reliable methodology to estimate the volume of irregular or undocumented migrants.

What Philippine government agencies also fail to capture are Filipinos who were overseas tourists and eventually got work in some host countries. This is the case in Singapore where even Filipinos there, when they have found work, are legal and documented even if they did not pass through the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration. Directly-hired overseas workers who do not see the need anymore to pass through the POEA are another example. It is also possible that some Filipinos abroad, whether temporary, permanent, or irregular/undocumented, have married foreign partners in host countries without needing to be registered with the Commission on Filipinos Overseas.

It is even more difficult to capture Filipinos who initially went to one country and eventually went to another country for work or settlement (especially to countries that can be traveled by land). Within a host country itself, unless that host country has a developed statistical system (e.g. United States, Canada), it is difficult to track the presence of Filipinos in particular provinces, counties, or towns.

Fluidity can also be seen in overseas Filipinos’ migration status in the host country. Initial data may have captured a Filipino who was an overseas worker (i.e. temporary migrant), but if the said worker became a permanent resident, this development is not easily recorded by data-capturing agencies. It has been the desire of many Filipinos abroad that given the opportunities available in a host country, as well as that country’s receptiveness to foreigners, Filipinos will try to acquire permanent residency status or even citizenship.

These instances brought about by international migration itself prove the fluidity of overseas human mobility.

Limitations of the data-capturing agencies themselves

Financial, human and technological resources are visible limitations of the data-capturing agencies. But this does not only apply to international migration statistics, but to the country’s entire statistical system.

An agency that plays a critical role in developing socio-economic statistics is the National Statistics Office. For the last four years, doing nationwide surveys that try to cover the near-entirety of the country’s 7,101 islands, NSO worked on just a PhP3.32 billion budget (the NSO’s 2008 budget of PhP979.151 million was even lower than the PhP1.029 billion the agency got in 2007).

The visible result is that some of NSO’s public use files and published datasets of some of its surveys are delayed in their actual release. More importantly, even the sampling frame of the NSO’s surveys (e.g. Survey on Overseas Filipinos, Family Income and Expenditures Survey, Labor Force Survey) had to be reduced to match to the scant resources available. Researchers of the Institute for Migration and Development Issues experienced the fact that while the 2005 to 2007 editions of the Survey on Overseas Filipinos are available at the NSO website, the public use files are not yet ready for public consumption since NSO’s statisticians are re-evaluating the weighting factor in the SOF’s sample size to cover the entire country.

What has been encountered also is the inability of some surveys to go down to the provincial level, or even to municipal and city levels. Previously, the Family Income and Expenditures Survey and the Labor Force Survey can go down to the provincial levels. But the 2003 FIES and the LFS done after 2003 cannot go down to the provincial level. If researchers wish to make provincial data, they have to seek the NSO’s permission yet the data cannot be publicly released due to sampling and statistical limitations. This is where this Statistical Almanac, for example in estimating remittances per province, had to use some statistical formula out of regional and national data from recent years, and with the help of some available provincial data from previous years.

Migration-related agencies also have their own limitations. The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration has a limited manpower complement in its Central Records Division to keep pace with the daily droves of departing overseas workers which the same agency processes. If the POEA processed some 1.1 million overseas workers in 2007, a personnel complement of less than 10 employees manage an average of 3,013 workers a day to have their work contracts processed and their names eventually included in the POEA’s administrative data. By ratio, a POEA employee involved in capturing international migration statistics has to handle over-400,000 current and previous records of deployed overseas workers (Donna Leceta, 2002: page 52). The Commission on Filipinos Overseas is luckier to be managing an annual departure of 70,000-to-80,000 registered emigrants annually.

The Bureau of Immigration and Deportation also remains to be a missing actor in the country’s international migration statistical system. The said agency has data on exiting and returning Filipinos and foreigners, including those according to purpose of overseas travel and return to the Philippines. However, various years of prodding by international migration stakeholders are not enough to convince BID to be more pro-active in generating international migration statistics. A migration expert even thinks that BID’s mandate is more leaned towards enforcement, and thus international migration statistics are put on the wayside. Other agencies have stressed the importance of BID in international migration statistical for many years already.

But we then go back to the limited resources at the government’s disposal. In 1995, when the Philippines enacted Republic Act 8042 or the “Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act,” that law mandated the creation of a Shared Government System on International Migration (SGISM). Under RA 8042, SGISM aims to “improve the monitoring and efficiency of government agencies in enforcing the provisions of RA 8042.” SGISM mandates international migration-related agencies to build their own databases on Filipinos abroad with: demographic information, an inventory of pending cases of Filipinos overseas; master lists of departing and arriving Filipinos; statistical profiles of Filipino migrants; overseas Filipinos and tourists; legal systems in foreign countries; and lists of labor and other human rights instruments for migrants. Computer facilities will then be provided to these agencies to allow data exchanges (Asian Development Bank, 2004: pages 68-69).

Unfortunately, there is still no SGISM.

Unfortunately also, there is no database of welfare and labor-related cases affecting overseas Filipino workers in various host countries (e.g. illegal recruitment, trafficking), volumes of repatriated or deported Filipino workers, legal cases related to overseas labor migration in all municipal and regional trial courts, or spouses or children of overseas workers assisted by social welfare agencies. Compiling these kinds of datasets, covering various years, is another full-fledged project in itself.

[ Back ]