[Music] and then let's discuss what is the role the current role of science and technology in the country right now and then let's ask ourselves what do we need to do it's easier to understand rather than saying it's stunted and underneath it it stunted and so because it did not have the opportunity to grow it did not grow as [Music] means that we can still do a lot this is not yet the peak of philippine um capabilities we can do a lot with what we have we can do a lot by improving what we have and therefore there's a lot of things that we can do with scientific values the problem is we're not there yet we're very far from that position in fact we asked uh the surveys uh among asean countries and our neighbors we're actually going to be very high numerically number 45 out of 46 for science 43 out of 45 in math and therefore if you look at it numerically high but you're really at the end of the line they're not really prepared to do science and technology and if they after k-12 most of them would not get into the stem trap most of them will not be scientists or engineers so this is obviously an education this is obviously as i've said earlier your filipino 13 year old is ill-prepared in science and math um only 60 65 of our high schools would have science equipment and therefore 35 percent will just draw their experiments in the board and tell the students this is what will happen if we had experiment and that's not the way to do science to do science effectively you have to have hands-on experience in other words you cannot imagine electricity unless you see a light uh light bulb light you cannot imagine the cell phone until you actually fold the cell phone and use it you cannot just describe that and this is that is what really happens not only in the basic science but even in the life science in many areas not only in the high school but also in the tertiary now in industrial growth it's much more edited the evidence that i will point to is the lack of jobs the lack of industries is one big reflection of the lack of industrial capacity in the country we don't have basic industries we don't have any ways to make things that we would be using now and of course without industries you don't have jobs and without jobs you don't have a future now this is one of my favorite slides it's a graph it's a graph of the gdp the gross domestic production of the country in terms of production services and public utilities 100 that's the whole economy and that's from 1946 to 2008 there's a second part of the slide the data is actually at the trending track now the first thing that you would notice is that since after the war okay 1946 agriculture has been steadily going down that's green now agriculture is very important in the country uh because it's it's the way that we will feed our nation now the fact is 70 of our people is engaged in agriculture 7 out of ten is engaged in agriculture and if you look at it in 1946 41 of our economy is agriculture right now 41 uh that 41 has gone down to less than 10 and the problem there is of course is that it's not that we cannot just feed ourselves that's the one of the most evident problem for students like you the problem would be that the 70 percent that is engaged in agriculture is now just sharing a very very small part that's not even the problem the bigger problem the bigger problem is in production in the manufacturing part the manufacturing part that's the gray dashed line so manufacturing first agriculture is equal to the blue line which is production so the manufacturing part that the dashed gray line is actually the ones that make the things that we use your computer your chair your clothes your food etc the things that you use and if you will see after the war we don't really have production that's obvious because all industrial production has been destroyed during the war but it has steadily increased but just plateaued or stayed there at around 23 on the average since 1950s so a productive capacity of the philippines has stayed relatively flat since the 1950s in terms of percentage we were just producing whatever we can we have produced in the 1950s as a percentage of our economy you know in terms of number but in terms of part of our economy we haven't really been producing that much we're just producing roughly one fourth of our economy is in production indeed thank you the problem of the lack of things that you would be needing in everyday life will be the problem so you'll go to a mall all the things that are important not because by choice of course there are very posh malls there but because there's nothing being produced here everything will be important you go to asari sari store not necessarily your trendiest place to buy things but you will not find anything that is produced here except for a very few items so even our condiments even are i mean this is the usual joke even our toothpick is made outside that's true not just the toothpick most of the things that you would use now if there is ever any production here is mostly very small okay not a very large scale production or if it's being produced here then it has a very large import component what do you think is the biggest export of the country it's something that you cannot eat it's something that you actually use every day it's hardest it's electronics you you would wonder electronics so that means if i go in recto okay then i can buy electronics at a very very um reduced price because it's your top export and therefore there must be we must be awash with electronics but we're not okay that largest export has a very large import component in other words to produce the electronics that we export we import everything else what do we do what do we add all the things that we add is just label now the problem of course is the labor costs here in the philippines are very low above et cetera and therefore you don't really do any science and technology anymore you just assemble things you export them that's it and that has gone even after the government has tried to recalculate changing baselines the trend of going production going down manufacturing going flat agriculture falling is actually the same so where what has taken up our economy i mean that means something is actually giving jobs however small to our economy no that's the services services like call centers back-end offices the service crews that you actually encounter in fast food the rentals that you have etc these are services now what is the very distinct nature services the problem with services is that you don't really get to hold anything from services you call a call center you don't bring home anything you get a service your red house okay the rental itself is a service okay so the services services do not really produce material objects the problem of course as i said earlier if you need something it will not come from services right so that's the whole problem of our economy right now um we don't produce a lot we're not an industrial economy we're pre-industrial we're still agrarian but backward at that backward in the sense that even up until now 2018 we still have people in doing agriculture by literally pushing their their their animals and literally doing artisanal work by hand they do it themselves and that's a very low productivity way of doing agriculture now even if you give them tractors they don't really own the land so nothing comes to them so what do we do what do filipinos if there's no jobs here what do most of your um like do they go out they go abroad most of our well 10 now around 11 10 to 11 of our filipino labor force is actually outside of the country and that's one way of finding jobs but do you know how much the jobs in saudi right now is is actually the same as the entry-level construction worker here in the country that just means that people filipinos would take any job opportunity even if it's outside of the country even if they don't have to come home okay and this headline is not surprising anymore right um that was that was last year you can actually find um that this trend has been going up the joblessness uh in fact it was surprising that even our philippine statistics authority does not report joblessness anymore they report um the percentage of those who have jobs it's a negative vietnam but joblessness but this is actually increasing uh since the last few years now most of you would be 18 to 24 right or wish to be 80 20 where do i divide so half of you it can be my left or my right will not have jobs if you try to find jobs right now in fact more than half 52 of your age range cannot find jobs it doesn't matter if you're from fau from usd from ub or any of those top universities because on the average that uh you your age group will have difficulties in finding jobs and that's the promise of um the job market you can find jobs if you have a good education but in this economy a good education is not a very big assurance that you will find why it's not because you don't have credentials it's because the economy cannot absorb the labor force that we're producing right now it's even the researchers in the in in the government and she's now a uh undersecretary professional in the dti and she has been she has been saying that we need to have manufacturing that they did try to have a manufacturing resurgence but this still is the main characterization of our economy we don't produce things if ever we have production we have extraction on one hand so we do have mining we do have sales at the other end right but we don't have production in the middle so what do we do if you need metal if you need higher what do you we do have iron ore we need iron in buildings but we don't actually produce iron bars so what we do is to export the iron ore and then buy it back is okay because the value that that cost there is because it it tries to reflect the value added the value added is transforming that for to to steal we don't have those value-added industries here now value-adding is part of science and technology and engineering if you have new processes to make better steel then you can sell your steel at a higher price but do you really need metallurgical engineers do you really need any chemistry because you don't really have that production you don't have that need maybe you would need structural engineers because you're building things but at the cost maybe you just need one you don't need thousands right you might need mining engineers but probably not those experience because all you need to find is the rock and that's the problem so you cannot really develop your science and technology because we don't have those industries so what do we do we have low value added manufacturing and low value added manufacturing yesterday i was in an electronics company the import as i said earlier a lot of their electronics resistors capacitors all the parts here all they do is to really put it together you put them together and then make a radio for your car make a make a device for your um for your computer etc we do manufacture hard disks in the philippines so even the hardest computer is sometimes made in the philippines but all they do is to actually assemble and most of our production is in that state so do you really need phds in chemistry et cetera how many of those that you would do and therefore it's not surprising to find scientists to go out right it's not just ordinary professionals it's even our highly trained scientists and engineers going out of the country nurses as well okay medical professionals etc who actually go and seek employment elsewhere reason we don't really have places for them in our economy they can participate in the economy but sometimes not a scientists or engineers and if you actually look around and find where are our experts there are you will find in general were around again very high 96 out of 139 well numerically i'm sorry at least numerically high but we're at the tail end as well and what this means is that if you're looking for an expert more often than not we cannot find the experts okay there's a roughly around 100 people 100 phds in physics in the country okay and this is roughly 100 million people that makes me a one in a million guy right the weight will actually press on my shoulders because there's one million people in the philippine center is actually depending on me to decide or to give anything information model anything in physics that's not a nice thing to think about and it's even worse for a lot of other scientific professions if we're actually going to to add together all the scientists and engineers do you know how many are there that includes all the experts here in feu would you guess that anybody guess there's only ten thousand in fact nine thousand eight hundred seventy research scientists and engineers in other words those who are really engaged in research you only have 10 000 in the whole country about 10 million i know some of the people here in your university research fellows you don't really have a lot of people and therefore it's very important that scientists or science students okay would actually try to develop and become more experts and stay here in the country so psy that includes everything science chemistry physics basic sciences economics etc because if you stay here then you add more number to whenever the people would need the experts right the reason here is partly because you don't really have a lot of funding but even if you double the funding even if you triple the funding which the government plans to do okay you don't really have people to absorb it i mean you get more um libo nah researchers if you don't have students to work with you you cannot do it everything okay the way to do it is that you should actually generate and let them let the experts stay here the problem is they don't have places to go and we only have like around one per 12 000 uh researcher density in the country that's very far from singapore it's one out of 164 okay but you know singapore is smaller than manila uh but thailand is a nice number to look at has one-fourth of what we have indonesia is a very large population has one half of it and vietnam as well the situation right now where we're in is that we don't have the industries we don't have any program for developing our the rural area to industrialize the area agricultural modernization is not even a big idea that is working in the agricultural department earlier they were talking about the sugar shortage okay and the solution was to import not to develop our sugar production but to input okay all ways to import now the reason was given um is that the they have to fill the need immediately but that was the same thing that they were saying a few years ago so lagging along this is a three-season company and that's the same thing for a lot of areas the research and development is not really integrated in the thinking of our policy makers and even of industry if you look at if you ask industry do you have any thing to make do you have any research and development in your country in your company they would say no we have very little okay in fact the federation of filipino industries says that they actually have little or none research and development in the country but those problems of sewage transportation etc can be actually solved okay by research and technology but not just researching technology but by better policy [Music] you