Officials of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) should have actively monitored the unexpected spectacle on Wednesday, when more than a thousand people trooped to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) head office in Manila, to claim their supposed share in “hidden wealth” intended for the Filipino people. Some would easily dismiss the crowd as a bunch of loonies looking for the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A “noble
This week, the government announced that economic growth in the first quarter this year was 5.7 percent (pna.gov.ph, 5/9/2024), and boasted that it outpaced the growth percentages of China (5.3) and Indonesia (5.1). Those are annualized growth rates, presumably. Subtracting our annual population growth of 1.5 percent, that translates to 4.2 percent growth per Filipino. However, with annual population growth already negative in China, and at only 0.7 percent in Indonesia (see “Our population handicap,” 4/27/2024), our rate of economic growth does not look so superior anymore. The term “development” covers so many things aside from economic well-being. It has many
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