Jumpstarting industry: opportunities and barriers
There is talk these days about reindustrializing. And there are urgent reasons why. According to statistics, industry – and manufacturing in particular – has been a declining contributor to total GDP for over three decades now. From industry, jobs of greater permanence and high productivity can be generated.
Financing follows reconstruction plan
he Aquino administration should not turn hope into despair. It shouldn’t squander this opportunity to provide the survivors of the calamities a new beginning.
My stroke: good and bad news
Don’t just harrumph and turn the page. It may save your life, because a stroke or brain attack is the second leading cause of death in the Philippines (as it is worldwide, except in low-income countries). The No. 1 is diseases of the heart. From what I see, the risk factors for both are very...
Yolanda’s singular message: To cope with super-disasters in the future, accelerate economic reforms to strengthen the economy
Few nations can cope adequately and timely with the human and physical havoc that the likes of Yolanda’s cataclysmic fury have brought to us. If it were confined to a local geography, it would have been manageable. But many areas in the Central Visayas were simultaneously devastated.
Here we go again: Congress tries to outsmart the SC
Are members of the House of Representatives pulling one over the Supreme Court by announcing that they are waiving their right to the remaining P12-billion PDAF provided that it would be used to bolster the Presidents’s Calamity Fund?
Blame game
Shoulda, woulda, coulda. That seems to be the blame game everyone is playing now with regard to our relief efforts. We coulda done this, or we shoulda gone that way, or we woulda made more of a difference.
Nature’s fury and the economic damage it brings
Natural disasters hit the country with regularity. Our defense against the brute force of physical laws is often inadequate even if we prepare for them.
Turning crises into opportunities
Every crisis offers an opportunity. The recent crises -- the Zamboanga armed conflict, the Bohol-Cebu earthquakes, and killer typhoon Yolanda -- are no different
Corporate cash holding in Asia
[with Akiko Terada-Hagiwara] We analyze the determinants of corporate saving in the form of changes in the stock of cash for 11 Asian economies using firm-level data from the Oriana Database for the 2002–2011 period.
How we lost the industrial manufacturing edge
One major trend in Philippine economic development is, despite rising income, the proportion contributed by industry to total output is one of relative decline. But at this stage of our development, this should not yet be the case.
DAP not in 2011 budget law; ergo, it cannot be augmented
The Philippine Constitution allows the use of "savings" to augment any item in the general appropriations law for their respective offices -- the President for the Office of the President, the Senate President for the Senate, the Speaker for the House of Representatives, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the heads of Constitutional...
Quick disbursing, mildly fiscally stimulating
The Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) is being trumpeted as quick disbursing -- a major boost to economic growth. But when is a fiscal stimulus truly effective? When, through higher government spending, or major tax cuts, aggregate demand is stimulated, preferably through higher consumer spending and temporary job creation.
