“THE world has been passing the Philippines by, literally. Back in 1960, the country had the second-highest per-capita income in Asia, lagging behind only Japan. But by the following decade, South Korea and Taiwan had surpassed it, and by the 1980s, Malaysia and Thailand had, too. China overtook it in the late 1990s. And now—an event that many Philippine elite thought they would never live to see—Indonesia has sailed past the Philippines.”—Ruchir Sharma, Newsweek, January 22, 2010
FAST-forward to the present, Filipinos and foreigners alike ask the million-dollar question: What happened? Why did the Philippine economy continuously retrogressed since 1953, the last year of President Elpidio Quirino’s term?
It is, indeed, an enigma why the Philippines today remains among the weakest in Asean. A new bestselling book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economist Daron Acemoglu, explains not only for economists and policy-makers, but also for laymen interested to know, why the Philippines should not fail at all.
Why Nations Fail, published by Random House, according to the Amazon’s book review, answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps, ignorance of what the right policies are?
Acemoglu and Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). To take just one of their fascinating examples, Korea is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on Earth, while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest.
“The South forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success, thus, spurred was sustained, because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass,” they said.
In this series of articles, you will understand why the Philippines, despite its strategic location and vast natural and human resources, remains at the bottom among the five original founders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
The roots of our economic crisis: Neocolonialism
“The sovereign nationhood was pure fiction, because the colonial power which supposedly returned to us the independence which it had wrested from Bonifacio’s revolution never really left and never really allowed us to exist and act as a free and sovereign people,” the late Harvard-trained economist-lawyer Alejandro Lichauco said.
In a conversation with this writer before his death in 2015, Lichauco said: “Any attempt to understand the essence and roots of the nation’s crisis must begin with recognition of the nature of the Philippine state. The Philippines isn’t, and one must stress that, a sovereign, independent state that it is assumed to be and which its Constitution claims it is.”
Lichauco said the Philippines is a neocolonial state, which, by definition, means a state, that is sovereign and independent in theory, but which, in fact, is the colony of another, or of others. As a people, we are the classic victim of what Webster’s New World Dictionary calls neocolonialism, and which it defines as “the exploitation of a supposedly independent nation as by imposing a puppet government.”
Lichauco continued: “Neocolonialist intervention, of course, hasn’t been confined to the political process. You see and feel the hand of that intervention in just about every aspect of Philippine society and the political economy. You see and feel it not only in government and politics, but in the business community, in our schools, civil society, media and even the churches.”
The intervention, recalled Lichauco, has been most crucial and fatal at the level of our presidential politics. As the late and former President Diosdado Macapagal admitted in an article he wrote for the Bulletin a few years before he passed away, the US government has been a decisive factor in every presidential election since 1935, and no presidential aspirant objectionable to Washington has ever been elected president. By the same token, any sitting president who manages to displease Washington invariably winds up unseated by Washington. That has been generally the fate of all incumbent presidents. They were mounted to office by Washington, and eventually unseated by Washington.
“If we have a total economic crisis in our hands,” Lichauco said, “a crisis that has the most visible and terrifying manifestation is the mass hunger, and not only the mass poverty that now grips the land and which government itself has acknowledged. It is because in this post-industrial age, we remain a nation of 100 million mired in the pre-industrial stage of history.”
The question is: Why have we remained stuck in the preindustrial age, when neighbors, once more impoverished and backward than we are, have either graduated, or are dramatically in the process of graduating, into the age of science and industry?
And the answer is that it has been planned that way. From the beginning, it was planned in Washington that the Philippines shall remain essentially a raw-material economy in order to service the raw-material requirements of an industrial Japan.
In 1946 the Truman administration adopted the recommendation of the report which proposed that Japan be developed as the primary, if not sole, industrial powerhouse in the Asia-Pacific region, and that countries like the Philippines should be preserved as raw-material economies, obviously to service the requirements of Japan’s factories.
To be continued
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com
1 comment
Wow, is that how dumb the Filipinos you think are? How about, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan? You have a very creative imagination.