Hidden violations of competitive neutrality
A rule or law may be de jure neutral but may be de facto nonneutral, that is, enforced in a nonneutral manner by the biased enforcement of the law.
Henry Sy: how innovative retailing for the masses built a business empire
On his passing just a fortnight ago, Henry Sy was the richest Filipino on the Forbes list of world billionaires. He started selling shoes to the masses and made it big into many directions of business.
Small town blues
When the big national retailers take interest in and flock to a local regional market, local capitalists tremble and scramble for refuge in remoter small towns, pushing even smaller players to the wall.
Price controls on medicines
The proposed law would empower the DPRB to cap prices of drugs and medicines, and to sanction non-compliant pharmaceutical companies and medicine retail outlets.Its purpose is to “effectively reduce the cost of drugs or medicines.” Now who could be against that?
Conglomerates and inclusion
Whether it is banking, real estate, retail and supermarket trade, food service, broadcasting and media, power generation, energy, infrastructure -- you name it, conglomerates are in it. Is conglomerate dominance to be feared? No, on the contrary.
Competition, regulation and institutional quality
Regulation and competition policy are two alternative modalities by which the state intervenes in the market. In order for either to deliver welfare gains, there must first be a pre-existing market failure.
Working for peanuts
Fructuosa Llana of Frux Food Products is a progressive entrepreneur. She recently started a promising line of snacks made from cassava flour and fortified with malunggay and other vegetables (grown in her own small garden). But her main business is still the peanut butter line she has been producing for more than a decade now....
Retail competition at the gas and diesel pumps
The Oil Deregulation Law – or Republic Act 8180 – was signed on Feb. 10, 1998. This week then marks the 17th year of implementation of a law that takes away from the government the direct fixing of fuel prices.
Screwing the customer?
Had not MWSS figuratively blown a whistle, customers of Maynilad and Manila Water (Concessionaires of MWSS) would not have known that they were being billed for the corporate income taxes being paid by the corporations. Not surprisingly, the reaction was outrage.
Improving competition in the domestic economy
One of the major pieces of economic legislation in Congress is an anti-trust bill. For years, several versions of such proposed legislation have competed for attention in the legislative mill, only to fail passage. Recently, the private chambers included this among its suggestions for priority legislation.
Signaling and contract cost under weak governance: Water service privatization in Metro-Manila
We show using a modified Laffont-Tirole cost-reimbursement contract model that the more reliable is the state in respect to the delivery of its contractual obligations, the lower is the cost of contracts to the state and society.
Abuse of authority, dereliction of duty
The Bureau of the Treasury is the official registry of scripless government securities (GS). The BTr function cannot be delegated to any other institution, especially a private one, since "the same is tantamount to abandonment by the government of its public function to safeguard the integrity of the information and data relative to public debts,"...
