In Thursday’s column (“Stimulus may not be all that stimulating,” April 30), I took a look at a recent Oxford Business assessment of government fiscal stimulus measures in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. It found that efforts to counter the deep economic damage caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic have so far been “moderate,” which is a polite way to say “inadequate” and a bit oversold by APAC governments, including the Philippines’.
Almost on cue, shortly after the Oxford Business brief appeared in my inbox, an unintentionally complementary study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) was released. The study, titled “Projected Disease Transmission, Health System Requirements and Macroeconomic Impacts of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) in the Philippines,” defines the scale of the problem the country is facing in numerical terms, and by inference, just how far short of the investment needed to overcome the epidemic the government is falling.