DAVAO CITY—Swedish Ambassador Inger Ultvedt advised the Philippines to make governance transparent and accountable and put a brake to the sending of too many talented people abroad.

Ultvedt was in Davao City Thursday on a visit before she closes the Manila embassy, whose responsibilities will be shouldered by the embassy in Bangkok.

She said transparency and accountability are keys to improving the well-being of Filipinos and urged the government to work seriously on these. “All the other problems facing your society would be easy to solve by then, including the issues of corruption and the poor delivery of basic services.”

She underlined the insufficiency of these key factors, saying, “To be transparent and to be accountable would cover a lot of ground for your country.”

Ultvedt was speaking at a welcome program tendered by the city government, which imbued it with an indigenous theme, at the Royal Mandaya Hotel. Attending were the vice consuls of Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan, which have consular offices here.

“You are not poor; you are a middle-income country,” she added. “You can further improve on it by investing on infrastructure. Put on good roads connecting your places. It is not a problem to do that because your people are hardworking.”

She noted, “you are good at providing labor services in the world” in further impressing on her audience the capability of the country to improve by itself.

But she has a cautionary warning. She said the government should rethink its labor-export policy because it damages the country. “You should not export your brains too much.”

Last year remittances by Filipinos abroad totaled $14.4 billion, the single-biggest factor that propped up the economy amid widespread domestic unemployment and high underemployment and public corruption, according to a World Bank report.

She has good reason to warn of over exporting Filipino brains to the disadvantage of domestic progress. The World Bank, in its East Asia Update this month, said that “Notwithstanding this performance, the economy continued to show persistent structural weaknesses—a low tax effort, high unemployment and underemployment and rising poverty.”

THE Philippines would do well to take a cue from China, which has been able to produce enough rice to feed its more than 1 billion population through massive planting of hybrid rice, said SL Agritech Corp. chairman Henry Lim.

THE New York-based Citi Group, one of the world’s largest financial-services firms, said the Philippines deserves more credit than Moody’s Investor Services has given it.

THE Japanese government and the national government are poised to operationalize the Philippines Water Revolving Fund (PWRF) that will allow local government units (LGUs) and government-owned and -controlled corporations (GOCCs) access to official development assistance (ODA) loans, according to the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda).

MALACAÑANG’S wish for early ratification of the Japan Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (Jpepa) ran into another obstacle Wednesday after three senators voiced doubts on the legality of a proposal by foreign relations committee chairman Sen. Miriam Santiago for the Senate to vote for conditional concurrence to the controversial treaty.

DAVAO CITY—Swedish Ambassador Inger Ultvedt advised the Philippines to make governance transparent and accountable and put a brake to the sending of too many talented people abroad.

HAGATNA, Guam—The Guam tourism office on Tuesday urged mayors from the Philippines to promote a two-way traffic for tourism between the Philippines and Micronesia by encouraging Filipino travelers to consider the region as their destination.

THE slowing world economy and rising inflation will be the major hurdles that Philippine businesses will deal with in 2008. This, according to Samie Lim, president of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) who spoke at the launching this week of the book  Whither the Philippines in the 21st Century in Makati City.

CEMENT literally is a major “building block” both of the ancient and modern times.

The  Assyrians and Babylonians used cement in the form of clay, and the Egyptians advanced to the discovery of lime and gypsum mortar as a binding agent for building structures such as the pyramids.