Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz, working with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, may finally do something concrete about the imperfections of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) accounting that economists have recognized for decades but have done little to address the problem. I remember that in the first edition of my economics textbook entitled Guide to Economics for Filipinos first published in 1972 (it is now in its seventh edition), I already discussed the possible distortions that GDP can introduce to the real concept of human welfare. Dr. Stiglitz is heading a commission to come out with better measures of human welfare that address the limitations of GDP.

As reported in the September 15, 2009 issue of the Financial Times, the commission headed by Dr. Stiglitz has noted that a narrow measure of market performance, such as GDP, has been confused with broader measures of welfare. Governments may focus everything on increasing their GDP growth rate, treating it as an end in itself when it should not be. This could possibly lead to distortions of policy and unsustainable growth (as may be the case in China). It can also create perverse incentives and false trade-offs: Action to curb climate change may be seen as damaging to GDP when it may be beneficial to the wellbeing of society. Actions to curb population growth may fall in the same category of counterproductive measures.

One glaring weakness of GDP as a measure of human welfare is its noninclusion of work done at home by the wife and other members of the family. Since these activities – like cooking, laundering, and other housekeeping services – do not enter the market and have no price tags, they are not given any economic value in GDP. What is even more ironic is that if the wife decides to work outside doing exactly the same things for a hotel, restaurant or another household and hires others to do her housekeeping, GDP can take a quantum leap since what used to be economically worthless will be given market values and, therefore, incorporated into GDP. It is very possible that human welfare may have actually declined in the home because the hired help may not provide the services with the same tender and loving care of a mother or a member of the family.

There are millions of homes in the Philippines in which immediate members of the family provide quality services to those who are employed outside. In the vast majority of these households which belong to the lower-income and middle-income sectors of society, sons and daughters already participate actively in doing housework, which if given economic value can significantly enhance human welfare as measured by the new form of accounting which would incorporate these services rendered at home. Just think of how great a reduction in human welfare there will be in this new measure if the proponents of birth control succeed in limiting the number of children per family to one or two (like in China now or Singapore in the past). That is the problem with those who see in babies only mouths to feed and are blind to the hands and brains that can do productive work.

This underestimation of the value of children is especially true in the rural areas, in which 70 percent of the Philippine poor reside. Filipino farmers are terribly handicapped by the lack of farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems, post-harvest facilities and other infrastructures needed to make their work productive. That is why they have to depend on many members of their household, including children, to help in the labor-intensive work they have to do in the farms. Just think of how much more impoverished the farmers' households would be if the population controllers succeed in convincing them to have only one or two children. Not only human welfare but even traditional GDP measures would decline. For our poor farmers, the only valuable resources are human resources. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the contraceptive-pushers do not see this point.

It is for these reasons that I do not give much value to polls that allege that the rate of unwanted pregnancies among mothers is high (I am not referring here to pregnancies that result from fornicatIon or violence). These polls are no different from the ones paid for by politicians and which consequently give high rankings to the paying presidentiables. The polls that talk about unwanted pregnancies and high demand for contraceptives are paid for by all types of family planning organizations, optimum population foundations and similar funding agencies that have a clear bias in favor of population control. A close examination of the questionnaires would reveal that the pollsters put words into the mouths of the respondents.

A recent one that takes the cake is a question which lumped together condoms, IUDs, and pills and asked the respondents if they think these are abortifacients. This is the height of deliberate obfuscation.

Condoms and many pills are not abortifacients.

They prevent conception. They are immoral because they prostitute sex by separating the unitive from the procreative purpose. But the morning-after pill and IUDs are abortifacients because they do not prevent conception but kill the fertilized ovum before implantation. By putting them all together in the same question, the pollsters got what they wanted: A negative answer. So the next time you read about a poll concerning the attitudes of Filipinos towards family planning, take the findings with a ton of salt. For comments, my e-mail address is bvillegas@uap.edu.ph.