Philippines 2050

The closing this week of the year-long quadricentenary celebration of the University of Santo Tomas and the astounding report by the international bank HSBC that the Philippines would become the world’s 16th largest economy by 2050 by virtue of improving macro-economic fundamentals, its large population and rising education standards, should impress upon naysayers, many of them Filipinos themselves, that the country must be doing something right all along.

Because it was released in the run-up to Monday’s Chinese Lunar New Year, the HSBC report, “The World in 2050,” has been met with incredulity, with critics attributing it to the geomancy typical of the season. But the report merely confirms, albeit in bolder terms, the rise of the Pacific Century, which has been heralded close to a generation ago. Most of the forecast largest economies and “star performers,” like the Philippines, Peru and Mexico, are in the Pacific Rim.

When he was president (1992-1998), Fidel V. Ramos made “Philippines 2000”—that is, the rise of the country as a dragon economy—his centerpiece. He could at least now take comfort in the fact that his vision has been more or less reaffirmed by the HSBC during, propitiously enough, the Year of the Dragon.

But even if the bank says that Philippine growth would be the most dramatic since it would leapfrog by 27 notches from its current status, Filipinos want more. Why wait for 38 years before the Philippines?

The answer is that all of the nation’s struggles are part of its learning curve. What the Philippines should do is to embrace the present with all its challenges. To be sure, the report does not consider how the communist and Muslim conflicts, both incidentally some 40 years old now, may dampen Philippine growth.

Still, the Philippines holds the biggest promise, according to HSBC, because of its robust population growth. In a rare moment of technocratic candor, HSBC virtually declares that high population is an economic plus, rather than a minus. “The losers are the small populations and aging economies of Europe,” the report says. Emerging economies of Eastern Europe would do well in the next decade “before demographics prove to be a drag.” Japan, predicted to slide down further behind China and India, would see its working population shrink by 37 percent because of demographic winter. Russia may have the world’s largest territory and is set to become the 15th biggest economy in 2050. But it would be just a step ahead of pygmy Philippines and its declining population would shrink its GDP by 31 percent.

The task now is to invest in human resources. The Department of Education’s K+12 program (kindergarten plus 12 years of basic schooling) has an onerous price tag (P57 billion!), but the debate on the issue is healthy because at least it confirms that there’s a serious effort to reform basic education.

Meanwhile, higher education, according to a study by economist Edita Tan, professor emeritus at the UP School of Economics, suffers from “poor quality, undeveloped innovation system, and inequality of access.” The nation should take inspiration from UST, which is closing this week its year-long celebration of its 400th anniversary in pomp and pageantry, and is eager to enter what it calls its “neo-centennial.” As a cradle of higher education in the Philippines, UST is also the oldest university in Asia: it’s in fact the alma mater of the founders of Asia’s first republic. The recent ruckus over its grant of a doctorate in law to Chief Justice Renato Corona has hardly ruffled the feathers of the Dominican institution. After all, it has gone through worse: it has survived global tsunamis and the vicissitudes of history, such as the British invasion and the Seven-Year War, the colonial regime change at the turn of the 20th century, and World War II when the Japanese turned the campus into a concentration camp.

Today, with some 5,000 graduates performing well in licensure exams, UST is, according to the Commission on Higher Education, the biggest producer of Filipino professionals. Moreover, in her study, Tan has concluded that graduates of UST perform much better in state exams than other schools charging higher fees.

The marvel is that UST has been doing all of this quietly.

Confidence comes with institution-building: UST has become a no-fuss colossus, unflappable and sometimes impenetrable, but a truly Filipino institution. While the nation is looking forward to 2050, UST is looking forward to its fifth centennial in 2111. Its confidence should inspire us.