Finally, economic takeoff for PH

Filipinos have more reasons to be upbeat this year and the years to come. For more than two years now, the Philippines stock index has breached the 5,000-index points. Most recently, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas announced that the country’s export revenues could grow at a faster rate on the back of a modest uptick in global demand. And the country’s 6.4-percent economic growth in the first quarter of this year, a complete turnaround from the dismal performance for the same period last year, bodes well for our country and our people.

Economic analysts have noted that the Philippines posesses the fundamentals to make it to the club of the emerging markets of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). HSBC has predicted that the country will become one of the top 20 world economies in the next decade. Morgan Stanley Investment Management estimated that for the period 2012-2016, the Philippines will register a GDP growth of 6 percent per annum, which is just a few notches below those of China and India for the same period. Time Magazine, in its April 23, 2012 issue, noted that the Philippines, once the laggard of Asia, was recovering the dynamism it had in the 1960s.

Certainly, the Aquino administration has put the country in good light among foreign investors that have always put a premium on the rule of law and anticorruption initiatives. The successful impeachment proceedings lent further credence to the Philippines’ commitment to the political-economic transparency.

As Ruchir Sharma, chief of the Emerging Markets Equity Team at Morgan Stanley, put it in his recent book “Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of Next Economic Miracle”: “Now at long last the Philippines looks poised to resume a period of strong growth.” He emphasized that an economic surge may happen if the Philippines, being the world’s fifth-richest in natural resources, rightfully manages its vast resources.

It is not only more government spending, higher OFW remittances, the upsurge in tourism, the expansion of the business process outsourcing industry that will catapult the Philippines to the new global economy. Above all else, it will be the Philippines’ high literacy level and English competency, both of which underpin the country’s comparative advantage in a global economy that is increasingly becoming knowledge-based—meaning, knowledge, not labor or material or capital, is its key resource.

As perceptively observed by Prof. Peter F. Drucker in his prophetic work “The Age of Social Transformation” (The Atlantic Monthly, November 1994), “The productivity of the knowledge work will become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the competitive position of every single country, every single industry, and every single institution within the society.”

No wonder we have dislodged India from the top in the BPO industry worldwide. Singapore has been raiding Philippine firms of their computer-savvy employees, who are offered salaries double or triple their current compensation in the Philippines.

—EDWARD B. CONTRERAS,

Tanque, Roxas City