On the eve of the end

Dean dela Paz / The Next Page

For any economy, even the most resilient, none can survive without foreign investments because domestic production and eventual supply, the assets behind it and the capital raised to fuel productivity will always fall short of local and international demand. The world is insatiable. Where economies are globalized, the hunger for productivity extends over national horizons, boundless and ever increasing. Demand increases faster than supply as physical limitations for the latter are torn down much slower than those erected against demand. It is the Law of Scarcity.

For a global economy recovering from recessionary pressures and now suddenly aggressive on the uptick, the return of insatiability can be daunting for economies content on parochial growth fueled by the relative weakness of the currencies of trading partners.

The festering weakness of the dollar and the challenges faced by the euro conspired to strengthen domestic currencies and created the illusion of economic strength.

Note some of the upsides that accidentally benefitted leaders who claimed competent economic governance and boasted of glitzy statistics like forex surpluses, hot stock-market indices sustained by speculative inflows, hefty domestic liquidity enough to squander on multibillion-peso doles and that most quoted of all, gross domestic productivity (GDP) growth next only to China’s.

Now into this administration’s final full year, it behooves us to take our bearings to validate if, indeed, the upsides were pluses.

Where officials hoped to institutionalize a legacy of anti-corruption spun as the “straight path” (tuwid na daan), heralded by centerpiece programs as the Bangsamoro Basic Law that might finally bring peace to the resource-rich south and, in the business world, the much-vaunted public-private partnerships (PPP) programs – all seem to be unraveling.

The “tuwid na daan” had been undermined by an unhealthy propensity to grant and eventually protect the aberrant influence of a dysfunctional coterie comprised of the infamous KKK (Kabarilan, Kaibigan and Kaklase). Lately such aberrations have turned deadly where pawns were betrayed, massacred in a gambit to cleanse the image of one of the KKK powers-that-be.

Equally questionable were pillars on the economic arena. GDP growth might, indeed, have been exceptional save for its failure to establish inclusive economic growth. The economic indices that should have reflected the benefits have shown inequities. Unemployment had worsened. Rather than GDP, the Gini Index, the involuntary hunger index and the increasing poverty incidences characterized our reality.

At the start, hopes were pinned on the PPP program, but the PPP has all but stalled where it should have long been chugging along, given the preparation, hype and the efforts to fire up its engines.

Somewhere in the middle, some smart-ass executive thought to swipe funds off budgeted expenditures, spirit these away under the curiously titled Disbursement Acceleration Program and thereupon feed patronage pigs previously fattened by pork barrels.

Had these been measures of levels of development, whether economic, social or political, then arrayed against minimums, the government seems to have hit rock bottom rather than achieve unprecedented heights. In each, there permeates an overwhelming amount of ineptitude and mismanagement.

For 2015, on the virtual eve of a change in government as Aquino makes preparations to leave the Palace and surrender the office to more competent hands, foreign investments are not expected to rush in as risk-averse investors watch and wait, given the political volatility that accompanies Philippine elections.

Fortunately, all downsides have upsides. The upside of 2015 is 2016 and a new team in Malacanang more discerning, more intelligent, less stupid, less inept, less bungling, and less vulnerable to aberrant influences.