THE COUNTRY'S unemployment rate worsened to 7.4 percent in January, bolstering criticisms that the growing economy has failed to create more jobs.

The unemployment rate in October 2007, when the last Labor Force Survey was conducted by the National Statistics Office, stood at 6.3 percent.

On a year-on-year basis, the latest unemployment rate eased slightly from 7.8 percent.

The NSO said the unemployment rate in January translated to 2.7 million jobless Filipinos out of the 36.4 million belonging to the labor force. In October, jobless Filipinos were estimated at 2.3 million.

The underemployment rate also rose to 18.9 percent in January from 18.1 percent in October. The NSO defines the underemployed as those who were seeking additional hours of work.

"There should be more effort to attract businesses to enter the country. Tourism should also be boosted to help in providing more jobs," said Myrna Asuncion, director for policy and planning at the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA).

Aside from creating more employment opportunities, Asuncion said that producing jobs of better quality should be another focus of the government. She noted that a substantial number of employed Filipinos were either self-employed or were unpaid family workers.

Documents from the NSO showed that of the 33.7 million employed Filipinos, about half or 51.7 percent earn wages and salaries either in government or private offices. Own-account workers comprise 36.1 percent of the employed Filipinos, while unpaid family workers stood at 12.2 percent.

"Ideally, what we want to have are more Filipinos who are employed and get paid. Another objective [besides merely creating jobs] is to decrease the number of unpaid family workers," Asuncion said.

The NEDA official said employment figures were expected to improve with the government's ongoing efforts to increase spending for infrastructure and tourism.

Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist and economist Cielito Habito earlier said the benefits of an improving economy have yet to be felt by the masses as many able Filipinos needed to get jobs.

Habito said the unemployment rate could have been worse had the NSO included in the labor force those who were not seeking jobs and depended fully on remittances sent by families working overseas. He noted that the NSO excluded this sector from the count of the total labor force.

The government recently announced that the economy grew 7.3 percent in 2007, the fastest in 31 years.