Quantifying benefits

In every presidential trip overseas, a considerable amount of effort is expended by Malacañang’s economic managers and spin doctors to quantify the financial gains of the activity.

Doubtless prompted by the exacting media and an understandable urge to justify the multimillion-peso tab associated with state or working visits, Malacañang often comes up with an impressive figure—in dollar terms, no less—to appease critics and explain away the costs of chartering an entire airliner (only a third of which the presidential party would fill) or the billeting of the entourage in a swank hotel in a foreign capital.

Indeed, the supposed financial gains from President Aquino’s recent trips to the United Kingdom and the United States have been pegged by Malacañang at $2.5 billion. This amount supposedly includes big-ticket items ranging from $1 billion to be spent by a power firm to expand existing power plants in the province of Bataan to projects so small—but useful over the long run, such as a research and development lab that a multinational firm will set up in Metro Manila—that Palace officials refuse to attach a dollar value to it.

Equally significant as the money pledges the President is reported to have brought home are the economic benefits he failed to bag.

In an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal last week, veteran trade journalist and longtime Philippine watcher Greg Rushford wrote that Mr. Aquino failed to win the approval of US President Barack Obama for tariff concessions that would have given local garment producers easier access to US markets (it’s something the Obama administration cannot afford to do in an election year).

So while Mr. Aquino flew back satisfied with the US government’s security assurances concerning the Philippines’ ongoing territorial dispute with China, Obama gave him the “brush off” and “sent him home empty-handed” in terms of economic benefits, Rushford concluded.

Yet a quantification of the gains of a presidential trip overseas—that is, adding up the dollar values of the agreements signed—may be a simplistic way of assessing its success or failure. It is an exercise that concedes short-term benefits to information-hungry reporters who need quick news stories to feed the 24-hour news cycle. Counting dollars and cents after each presidential trip abroad not only provides the local population news based on false assumptions—for example, that it takes the President to woo foreign investors and seal the deals—but also demeans his office. It is an attempt at making the public believe that big-ticket agreements can be sewn up only if the President flies to the home country of investors—and eventually returns to his own with the proverbial “bacon” to feed his household.

Actually, there are ministers and managers, lower-level functionaries and the private sector to do that. (And, quite unlike Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi speaking at the International Labor Organization in Geneva to seek “aid and investment that will strengthen the democratization process by promoting social and economic progress that is beneficial to political reform” in her country, most deals “sealed” during presidential visits are negotiated well in advance of the actual trips.)

The public interest will be better served when the benefits of foreign trips are viewed in more inclusive terms. And for now, the biggest economic benefits that the Aquino administration brought home from the trips to the United Kingdom and the United States can be summed up in one word: goodwill.

For British and American businessmen and financiers, few things are as reassuring as seeing the leader of their own country pressing flesh with the leader of another country in which they are thinking of investing. Thus, it should be of little surprise to Filipinos if foreign investors apprehensive of the prospects of a weak US economy, a debt crisis in Europe, and a slowdown in China would choose to plow their money into the Philippines in the coming months.

If one thinks about the positive buzz that Mr. Aquino generated through his foreign travels—the reassurance that investors got at hearing him speak and nimbly answer tough questions, the confidence they gained from having met his economic lieutenants—a number like $2.5 billion dramatically understates the benefits realized.