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By Luis Leoncio Consumers remain gloomy as pessimists continue to dominate in the quarterly consumer expectation survey of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), with the confidence index (CI) for the second quarter sinking to a negative 6.4 percent from negative 5.7 percent in the first quarter. 

By Luis Leoncio  Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings said the low income level in the Philippines, owing to high unemployment (6. 5 percent) and underemployment (21 percent), remains a key constraint to its economic resilience despite a prosperous economy. 

Nine of the Philippines’s biggest firms have made it to Forbes’s biggest 2,000 companies in the world in terms of market capitalization. 

By Riza Lozada  Vicious competition is preventing the Philippines’s two major telecommunications firms from interconnecting their broadband networks, which has proved to be a major hindrance to improving Internet connection in the country, Oxford Business Group (OBG) has confirmed.

By Jerry Maglunog  In terms of economic management, President Aquino was a dismal failure despite leaving at least P160-billion savings in the National Treasury, according to former Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno. 

Social watchdogs said the outgoing administration failed to improve the lives of Filipinos despite the strong economic growth posted during President Aquino’s term that averaged above 6 percent yearly.

By Riza Lozada  The continuing neglect of the agriculture sector and the erratic performance of the manufacturing sector are causing concern that the Philippines’s strong economic growth that hit 6.9 percent in the first quarter of 2016 would not be sustained. Prof. Benjamin Diokno of the University of the Philippines School of Economics, said the growth “spurt” during the first …

By Luis Leoncio  Get more professionals and fewer politicians. 

By Jerry Maglunog  A top official of one of the country’s biggest banks has urged the incoming Duterte administration to scrap its predecessor’s failed public-private partnership (PPP) program and start building much-needed infrastructure on its own, using its own funds. 

By Luis Leoncio As the Senate ended its probe last week into the money-laundering case involving the $81 million that hackers stole from Bangladesh Bank (BB), the central bank of that country, Bangladesh officials kept up their demands for the return of the money.