On the latter, we are happy to report that nine banks have entered the Philippine banking industry thus far, with six more banks expressing interest. Moreover, to guarantee that our monetary policy actions are better transmitted into market pricing, we introduced the Interest Rate Corridor last year.
4 So, going forward, I’m going to think of the steady-state unemployment rate as a good approximation of the actual unemployment rate. Now let me focus on job finding, which is often thought to depend on the number of job vacancies relative to the number of unemployed workers.