I am not saying that I can name specific foreign investors who are ready to pull out. But there must be a good number of them. This I surmise from a joint letter to Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima from the heads of various foreign chambers of commerce in the Philippines.
International credit watchdog Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services affirmed last week the Philippines’ investment-grade status, a month after Fitch Ratings gave it its first investment-grade credit rating.
Coconut woman is calling out/And every day you can hear her shout/Get your coconut water/Man, it’s good for your daughter/Coco got a lot of iron/Make you strong like a lion…
The next three years, from 2013 to 2016, are critical years for the Philippines. They represent the last three years of the Aquino administration—the second half of the six-year journey to completed reforms and better governance. Coming off a first half that saw the country growing from strength to strength and gaining in visibility on the global stage, the second half will bring greater attention, higher expectations, and more pressure to deliver results. It will be equally important to think about institutionalizing reforms so they become irreversible. The reforms must outlast the term of the present administration. These will be its greatest legacy. We all have a role to play in creating this legacy.
The man is now CEO of the Bank of Singapore, one of the world’s largest banks. His biggest challenge as the bank’s top honcho is an enviable one—continual increase in business, although he admits that people are quite a challenge. Renato de Guzman was featured in the Feb. 24 issue of the Inquirer’s Business section. [...]
Do economics textbooks ask the right questions? Can they muster tangible measures for the desperately poor? Two Cambridge University dons debated on the issue in autumn 1953. Their chat led to the crafting of what we know today as the “Human Development Index” (HDI).
A brewing legal battle between two giant corporations in the Philippines and Indonesia is in the offing—a classic manifestation that in the business world, no matter how small or large the deal, there is what they say in local business parlance, “onsehan,” a situation where one party pulls a fast one on the other.
Our economy’s growth rate may have stepped up to 6.6 percent from 3.9 percent in 2011, but that’s still not quite growing twice as fast—the declared goal of last year’s “Arangkada” forum of the Joint Foreign Chambers of the Philippines (JFC). Last week, the JFC gathered once again for “Arangkada 2013” to assess progress on a package of recommendations they made in late 2010 toward achieving accelerated and broad-based growth for the Philippine economy. More than two years hence, the group again took stock of forward movement—or the lack of it—in some 470 recommendations embodied in the 2010 document of the same name.
It’s one of the key measures of our competitiveness and a report titled “The Ease of Doing Business,” prepared by the International Finance Corp. (IFC, a part of the World Bank Group), measures precisely that for the last 10 years. The report tracks the ease of doing business across 10 important processes or transactions which any business must undertake with a government agency or agencies. The key measures are the number of steps, the amount of time (measured in days), and the cost of going through these transactions. In some cases, it simply measures the presence or absence of a mechanism that offers investors some protection or access to information.
One of the biggest drawbacks to our economic development is the way our Congress allocates and distributes the “pork barrel,” now known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF). Contrary to the general perception, our pork barrel system is unique in the world. It amounts to an “entitlement” to all members of Congress for them to determine individually how the national funds are to be spent in their particular districts or constituencies.
As a young lawyer, I used to complain to my mentor, Allison J. Gibbs, that often tax laws defy common sense. He would reply that tax laws and their implementation are simply exactions of the state to which logic or common sense take a back seat.
What can the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) be thinking? For that matter, what can the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) be thinking? Why are they just sitting back and scratching their b–s as they wait for the merger of Allied Bank and Philippine National Bank to take place? Why aren’t they going to the Supreme Court and seeking a temporary restraining order, or instituting quo warranto proceedings? Why are they allowing the Filipino people to get screwed (again)?
