Aquino’s Legacy: Exclusive Growth, Ineffectual Bureaucracy

An Assessment of the Aquino III government (2010-2016)

James Matthew Miraflor

Vice President, Freedom from Debt Coalition

The verdict is in.

If there is one catch-phrase that can summarize the legacy of President Benigno Simeon Aquino III in his half-a-decade rule, it is this: “exclusive growth via an ineffectual bureaucracy”. A growth dictated by the moods of global market amid worsening poverty and stagnating inequality levels, and the failure of the bureaucracy to even spend the money it was able to collect to arrest poverty – these cap the legacy of who was once touted as a savior of Philippine democracy and commonweal from the dark years of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Did Aquino III measure up?

We argue that this is not just an accident of history that Aquino III failed to fulfill his mantra of “kung walang korap, walang mahirap”. Granting that we have made strides in the fight against corruption – a statement that is made with some reservation given the proliferation of patrimonialism in Congress and the national government agencies – it would have been simply illogical to assume that those strides alone will translate to better welfare for the rest of the Filipino people. Rather, we insist that the failures of Aquino III are deeply rooted to its philosophy of government – the vision it constructed when it translated its “social contract” into the 2010-2016 Philippine Development Plan (PDP).

Progressive groups such as the Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) already criticized the 2010-2016 PDP from its inception, saying that it is weak on asset reform and fails to construct the economic underpinnings of a true “straight path” and “inclusive growth”. NEDA, under the neoliberal Director-General Cayetano Paderanga, basically ripped-off the agenda of Arangkada Philippines, a document prepared by the Joint Foreign Chambers of the Philippines (see letter from JFC to Paderanga here). This meant that the resulting PDP basically champions the interest of big capital over the interest of the Filipino masses. That the Aquino administration would end its term with increasing number of poor citizens in a growing economy demonstrates the bias it has set for itself when it began.

Two Pre-SONA Talks on the Philippine Economy (@ UP Diliman)

Economics students and would-be policy makers cannot afford to miss these two events - two talks (in the University of the Philippines Diliman) on Philippine development prospects and outlook days before President Benigno Aquino III's second State of the Nation Address (SONA). From two contending ideological camps, the Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) which espouses a developmentalist state and the UP School of Economics (UPSE) which retains its neoclassical foundations, we stand to learn more about the dynamics of the Philippine economy, the interaction of government, firms, and the consumers.







See details below.

Progress of Civilization: from BBC's Hans Rosling

Happy 2011 everyone!

As we celebrate the coming year with hope and optimism for change and progress, let us look at the video clip below to remind us, despite the apparent global convulsion due to the  flawed economic paradigm of neoliberalism, how much the world has progressed across centuries. The presentation by Hans Rosling, a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker, can serve as inspiration of how much innovation and technological change can push nations from the brink of poverty towards modernity.

The trajectory of growth (and how they sort of "converge") reminds me of the Solow–Swan model (also known as the exogenous growth model and the neoclassical growth model) - a model of a long-run economic growth. The model was developed independently by Robert Solow and T. Swan from the earlier  Harrod-Domar model used to explain an economy's growth rate in terms of the level of saving and productivity of capital.