It has become a tradition for us at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas to spend our first Tuesday of the year with you. 2020 was an extraordinary year because of the COVID-19 pandemic which, by the way, is more than a health crisis, as the country also felt its debilitating impact on lives, livelihoods, and inequality.
The composition has been gradually shifting away from labor-intensive products, such as clothing and other light manufacturing goods, toward machine products that require a relatively high degree of processing, such as IT-related machinery. Against that background, intra-regional trade has been expanding. Japan has been exporting high-tech parts and importing final goods from Asian countries assembled utilizing the abundant labor force in the area.