It is reassuring to hear Dr. Ernesto M. Pernia, the newly designated secretary of the National Economic and Development Authority, saying our economy can easily grow in excess of 7 percent a year, to break any record claimed by the current administration. We need this statement, first, to restore our faith in our ability to realize our dreams and, second, to liberate us from the degrading effect of the current administration’s propaganda that a 6-percent annual growth of GDP is spectacular achievement. In fact, such performance is only moderately higher than the “low-level equilibrium trap” Harvey Leibenstein pointed out some 60 years ago.
The incoming government’s eight-point program of economic development is in favor of amending our Constitution to liberalize its restrictive economic provisions. People with “common sense” can only agree, knowing that whatever you say to attract tourists to your beautiful destinations if you set up barriers against them, they will never come. Cite ad nauseam favorable grades of rating agencies, foreign direct investments (FDI) will never come so long as you bar them with restrictive economic laws and regulations.
All these explain why, despite desperate efforts by all our presidents to attract them into our country in the last three decades, FDI inflows are the smallest compared to those entering other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. On the basis of the data, one can even say that FDI seem to avoid us like the plague.
Sometime last year Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr., who, we are certain, will no longer be Speaker in the next Congress, following congressmen’s and senators’ glorious tradition of switching to where the wind blows, sponsored a House-Senate joint resolution to liberalize the Constitution’s restrictive economic provisions, only to withdraw it when he saw he didn’t have the numbers. Any revival of that resolution at this point will be guaranteed success in the spirit of that glorious tradition, but better for the Speaker to defer to the Constitutional Convention that the new leadership is planning to call. The convention will redeem his initiative.
We believe that a clearing of the constitutional restrictions will result, after a period of adjustment on both sides of the ocean, in a fivefold increase in the FDI intake of our country to bring us abreast of our Asean neighbors.
The clearing of constitutional restrictions is of critical importance to the acceleration of our economy’s growth. But so is the implementation of supportive regulatory policies and, of course, the purging of corrupt leaderships in relevant government agencies.
A quotable from Pernia: “We are a people of vicious patience. What we need is to become a people with virtuous impatience. Instead of being tolerant with mediocrity, let’s be demanding of service of the highest quality.’’
We agree. We call on our countrymen and countrywomen to cooperate with our new leader. We are hopeful he will lead us to the kind of future we dream for this generation and the next.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano