WB policies, loans worsen poverty in PH

World Bank president Robert Zoellick met President Aquino’s economic team late last month.

Research group IBON would like to point out that after over five decades of flawed policy advice and $14.7 billion in loans from the World Bank, the Philippines remains poor in every sector of the economy.

Zoellick also visited a poor community that has benefited from the World Bank-designed and -supported conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. The CCT continues the World Bank’s long history of flawed policymaking in the country and deodorizes the much-discredited globalization model. In fact, the CCT program is a reaction to widespread poverty in the country caused by decades of uninterrupted economic liberalization promoted by the World Bank and other finance institutions. The domestic economy has been weakened by dozens of World Bank structural adjustment programs resulting in jobless growth, record forced migration and chronic poverty.

The CCT is a multibillion-peso temporary relief effort that does not address poverty but diverts from the basic socio-economic reforms that the country needs. The $405-million World Bank loan for the CCT program is its second largest among some 250 development loans to the Philippines since 1957. IBON estimates that the Philippines will be repaying $500 million on World Bank’s CCT loan.

The CCT has been part of a country assistance program and policy advice of the World Bank since 2009. This policy advice pushes for higher taxes, lower government spending, health and water privatization, infrastructure privatization through public-private partnerships (PPPs) and agricultural liberalization.

These policies are packaged by the World Bank as drivers of development, but the country’s experience has proven that these only worsen poverty. Meanwhile, World Bank’s poverty programs, like the CCT, are just meant to cover up the harsh effects caused by its bankrupt development model.

—SONNY AFRICA,

research head, IBON Foundation Inc.,

IBON Center, 114 Timog Avenue, QC