There will be brighter employment prospects for the Philippines in 2012 according to the World Bank (WB). In the Philippine Quarterly Update: From Stability To Prosperity, released recently, the World Bank said that the Philippines’ business process outsourcing (BPO) sector alone is expected to generate 100,000 new jobs for 2012.

The World Bank said that the projected improvement in job prospects in the country is because of increased public spending and continued growth in the BPO sector. 

In the Philippines Quarterly Update, the World Bank said, as quoted in a report in abs-cbnnews.com, that higher spending on infrastructure is expected to generate hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the trade and construction subsectors while continued growth in the BPO sector is expected to create 100,000 new jobs, even as “industry expansion is being slowed down by the diminishing supply of qualified workers.”

Rogier J. E. van den Brink, World Bank Lead Economist, added that while “the global economic environment is not very good, the Philippines has strong fundamentals. That provides an excellent base to now seize the opportunity that the global rebalancing is presenting… Catching the next wave of investments into emerging markets, the Philippines can be the primary destination for it.”

The local BPO sector currently provides employment to around 700,000 Filipinos; some 61 percent of these BPO employees are in the call center subsector. 

Finance and accounting have been identified as among the fastest growing subsectors of the Philippine BPO sector.