MANILA, Philippines—Economic indicators show that the Philippines has been asleep for close to three decades and, according to Senator Francis Pangilinan, no one knows when the country will wake up from this economic hibernation.

Citing statistics he culled here and abroad, Pangilinan said that the country’s per capita income has grown only by 0.75 percent growth from 1981 to the present, versus 400 percent for China, 150 percent for Malaysia and 100 percent for Thailand.

"We have slept. We are earning today the same amounts we were earning nearly 30 years ago. It's as if we slept for 30 years. This is what our government leaders have to show for all these years," he said in a phone interview.

As the world celebrated Labor Day on Friday, Pangilinan said it would take a new brand of public sector leadership to “pull our country out of the mess we’re in.”

He said it was the government itself that failed the workers and the whole nation.

“Public leaders should go through self-flagellation for this failure and then undertake collective hara-kiri (suicide),” said the senator.

Asked if the finance managers of the Arroyo administration could still reverse the trend, he said: “If it hasn’t changed significantly in the last 30 years, I don’t see how it will change in the next year. The economic policies we have adopted have failed to address poverty and unemployment. It is time to look for out-of-the-box solutions to end the boom-and-bust cycles of our economy.”

He urged government officials to set aside politicking and personal motives and work together to create more jobs at home.

“We cannot keep on doing the same things and expect different results. We might as well hit ourselves on the head with a rock,” he said.

He also called on the Palace to stop relying on remittances from overseas Filipino workers to keep the economy afloat, and warned that sending workers abroad was not the solution to the lack of jobs here.

“Our overseas Filipino workers are exposed to great risks while they’re abroad, and their families are suffering from various social ills. This is not the solution we’re looking for,” he said, adding, “Sending Filipinos abroad is merely a band-aid solution and will not be sustainable in the long term.”

For the country to prosper, Pangilinan said, public sector leaders need to offer Filipinos a clear vision and a concrete program of action anchored on principles and integrity, rather than a series of stop-gap measures based on the “politics of survival and corruption.”

“We need to sit down and work out a program to create jobs, enable entrepreneurship, and encourage more overseas Filipinos to invest back home,” he said.