With the economy getting better and the living condition improved, GMA recently declared that the Philippines is succesfully taking significant steps towards progress.. And she pointed out that we have potentials of hopefully becoming a first world nation by 2020, if the country can keep the momentum on the way to reaching first-world status..

Philippines as a first-world nation.. is it just a dream?.. or can we make it happen in reality?

What can you say?

Not in our lifetime, to be blunt about it; and probably not even in our children's lifetime. Being first world is much more than jobs, or even infrastructure. Other concerns such as quality universal public education and health and strong institutions play a bigger part in first world living. If ordinary citizens don't have access to these benefits, they will still feel squeezed even if they have jobs. Those benefits don't just happen over a year, or even 10 years.

It took Korea and Taiwan 30 years to become progressive. Malaysia espects to reach its target over the same period (Vision 2020, started in the 90s). Assuming the Philippines started tomorrow, expect the process to take that long. And that's assuming it started tomorrow...

I'm seeing progress. After all, the peso is back to the 49/50 borderline.

However, will this continue? I hope so. Coz I don't see a first world Philippines in my lifetime.

well, hope will do already for the mean time.. if only every Filipino has hope for the nation's future, then I can say we're ready to take-off for progress..

maybe a "first world country" compared to the old corrupt philippines in about 10 years.. if this "progress" continues.

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The thing about the development process in general is that there is no middle ground. Either a country becomes progressive or it remains destitute. If the Philippines will remain a poor country 10 years from now – as it most likely will – it won’t matter how much arguably better economic conditions will be by then when compared with today. The educated middle class will still feel constrained just to earn a decent quality of life and the poor will continue to despair. That is what really matters in the bigger picture.

do you think part of the Filipino culture, tradition and historical background belongs to the factors which hinder the economic boost of the country? does our heritage hold back the realization of our ultimate dream for the Filipino people & nation?..

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I can buy the historical angle. The country inherited and was ingrained with a very old-world notion that only those who were born into wealth or were well-connected with movers and shakers had the right to power and the privileges that came along with it. The result is crony capitalism - a situation where the political and economic leadership does not represent the interests of the majority. Decisions that affect 100% of the population are made by only the “elite” 5% who subsequently choose those decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the remaining 95%. You can see these things happening in plain sight:

- RTC acquitting Lucio Tan from a P25 billion tax evasion case
- Globe and Smart getting generous tax breaks just so they can roll out 3G
- Rich owners of pre-need companies getting away from screwing middle class planholders
- Bank owners using depositors’ money to lend to themselves and their rich friends
- SSS funds being used to help rich families take control of companies
- OFW funds being used to fund populist programs during election time

The benefits of economic growth cannot trickle down to the majority (in the form of universal benefits like quality education, public health, infrastructure, rule of law, strong institutions, etc.) if the elites keep on appropriating these benefits among themselves. Mula noong naging independent yung Pilipinas, walang katapusan ang mga pangyayaring ito.

Trouble is that once this kind of malaise becomes ingrained, it becomes very hard to shake off.

As I said in one of the threads a couple of years back, the only way for us to get out of this rut is to strengthen the middle class. The upper 5% doesn't give a rat's @$$ whether or not the country is going down the gurgler; they have enough wealth to ensure comfortable living for them and their great grandchildren. The lowest in the socioeconomic rung has enough worries wondering where the next meal will come from.

In world history, change has always been instituted through middle class strengthening. The French Revolution, the Singapore phenomenon, and even the EDSA revolution(?s).

No matter what the "economic indicators" say, if there is no trickle down effect and if the educated middle class prefers to seek their destinies overseas (another issue in itself) the rich will only get richer and the poor will remain destitute.

you're pulling words out of the bag too quickly. no middle ground? a country is either the US or somalia?


there is a problem in definition and measurement there. the second sentence is holds in all countries rich and poor.

I am pulling words out of the bag quickly. That’s why I qualified my statement with “in general”. The thread is about being first world, and my point was that there is no such thing as a country becoming first world by simply comparing it to the way it was at some point in time in the past. There is a bar that needs to be crossed for a country to attain first world status; either it has crossed that bar or it hasn’t.



Yes, there is a problem in definition and measurement; I didn’t intend to be exhaustive when I posted that, nor do I plan to post a dissertation in this forum. Just to be more specific, even when segmenting for each country’s own income brackets, poor and middle income citizens of poor countries lag behind their counterparts in rich countries when it comes to the more salient drivers of economic / developmental well being – ex., gross enrollment ratios at various educational levels, school completion rates, international assessment scores and life expectancy to name a few. We can go through the motions of enumerating this (I have) and this will turn out to be true in most cases, with a few exceptions like countries such as Cuba (technically second world) and Panama.

What this means is that at a time when there is a higher value-add on information, and education and proficiencies have a higher influence on income mobility, the poor and middle class of rich countries - including their children - are more likely to attain higher levels of education, score higher in academic subjects and be able to work longer in their lives.

Admittedly, this doesn’t measure emotional well-being like overall happiness with life in general, for example.

that was a good clarification. but "progressive" doesn't necessarily mean "first world". the former is time series while the latter's comparative. and the time it takes to become "first world" should not be confused with the time it takes to convert from agricultural to industrial, which is what your tiawanese example actually meant. one can improve education and quality of life in a shorter time without a major modification in the direction of human resources and source of income. for instance, it is not too far-fetched for our OFWs and onshore BPO personnel to generate income within 10 years that is so large, it will shame many industrialized exporting countries.

it takes all kinds. new zealand, for example is a largely agricultural country. as a finance and technology player, it's second rate and will probably remain so. not enough good students, good people, cheap professionals. and don't try to inject the singabore formula because it's really just a pin-prick investment center. put singapore in a sovereign country bigger than mindanao and it'll have all kinds of problems.

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I’ve always maintained in this thread that being first world for a country is a status of overall human well being (ie, quality of life). For a more precise definition, use the term "developed" as opposed to "industrialized". See my first post in the thread; it holds the same even when I mentioned the Taiwan example which is what it was meant for. Their industrialization aside, they do better in certain measurements of quality than some members of the OECD; for example, their math and science test scores for 9 to 13 year olds is higher than the US and their gross enrollment ratio for 6 to 21 year olds is higher than Korea’s. Even Malaysia’s Vision 2020 (http://www.wawasan2020.com/vision/) aims for the country to be fully developed in more than just the industrial sense. There are several ways of setting the bar by grouping such countries - OECD membership, being part of IMF's "advanced economies" list or UN's "high development" bracket in their Human Development Index; the countries in these groupings tend to be more or less the same ones.

I agree that the mix of industrial sectors takes all kinds. My point was that rich / developed countries have common features. One is the well-being of their citizens. You mentioned New Zealand; they are not an agricultural country. Their service sector output is 7 times larger than their agricultural output (which doesn’t necessarily mean that an agricultural country, in theory, can’t be a developed one). But more importantly they perform well in quality statistics; their students’ test scores are among the highest in the world (much higher than the US and even higher than Switzerland’s) and they have one of the longest life expectancies, not to mention strong and transparent institutions that are difficult to measure. Another is intensive gov’t support for the main drivers (social benefits) of quality of life – primary / secondary education, health care, rule of law / institutions, etc. These are the equalizers that allow the poor and middle class to become upwardly mobile. Back to New Zealand, the state spends among the highest in the world per capita on public education and health and they rank #2 in the world corruption index.

To tie it all up, I don’t know if there’s a country coming from the Philippines’ level reaching such a status in 10 years or less without direct outside help; especially if ordinary citizens have to pay for those quality drivers out of their take-home pay despite already having paid for taxes and SSS. BPO, OFW or any kind of job sector development will not be sufficient if such job sector development isn’t done in tandem with development of human well-being.

From Randy David...

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Public Lives : How much poverty can a nation take?
By Randy David
Columnist
Inquirer
Posted date: November 12, 2006

HOW much poverty can a nation take before it starts to disintegrate? The latest Social Weather Stations survey reports that 51 percent of the people it asked rated themselves poor, and that almost 3 million Filipino households experienced hunger in the last three months.

In themselves, surveys about poverty have no intrinsic meaning. Individuals have different thresholds of pain. And responses to hunger can vary from pious acceptance to revolutionary resistance. Every society has its own safety-valve mechanisms.

But hunger is first of all a problem for the modern nation-state. If the state cannot guarantee its citizens the minimum conditions for a decent life, it will soon lose its reason for being.

All around us are telltale signs that the nation’s disintegration may have actually begun. More than 8 million adult Filipinos now live and work abroad, many of them preferring to stay permanently where they are. They faithfully send money to the loved ones they have left behind. But how many of them are happy about paying taxes to the Philippine government?

To almost every human need we can think of today, the state response has been to privatize fulfillment—i.e., to make need satisfaction entirely dependent on the individual’s capacity to pay. Schooling, health care, housing, water, mass transportation, electricity, leisure, communication and even personal security—name it, it is private enterprise that is there to answer the need. If this is what the future is like, then it is not farfetched to imagine the eventual withering of the state—paving the way for the privatization of law-making and the outsourcing of governance itself.

A state cannot leave its citizens to fend for themselves without facing the long-term consequences of its own neglect. Without a future to look forward to at home, the citizens will, at the first opportunity, pack up and leave—as millions of Filipinos have done in the last three decades, and still do, by the thousands every day.

Those who are too poor to pay their passage out of the country will pitch their tattered tents on pavements or build their hovels on public and private land. They will illicitly tap into any water or electricity source, snatch cell phones and steal from their equally impoverished neighbors. They will work as runners for drug and criminal syndicates. They will send their children out into the busy streets of the metropolis to beg. They will peer into trash cans in search of left-over food, or recyclable metal and plastic. They will cut existing power lines for the aluminum wire, steal the copper casing of water meters and fire hydrants, and remove the metal covers of manholes. And when they have run out of things to sell to the junk shop, they will retail their blood and their kidneys, or rent out their whole bodies. They will even sell their young offspring. All these are already happening today.

The ideal of a modern republican state, in which citizens stand equally before the law, has long been exposed to be a gigantic lie. The deep inequalities created by a vicious property system cancel all the romantic visions of a nation of equal citizens enjoying the blessings of a just social order. It is no wonder that people are turning to the tightly knit communities of faith for the support they cannot find in the nation-state. Not many churches or mosques, however, have this kind of capacity. In many societies, it is the warlords who step up to fill the space vacated by the failed state.

The symptoms of a failing state are so commonplace that we seldom see their significance. Our first instinct is to react to the threat they pose by resorting to private solutions—costly adaptations with limited social value. That is how, over the years, this society has quietly assembled possibly the world’s largest army of private security guards. For we’ve long stopped turning to the police for protection. Residential subdivisions and condos, private schools, universities, office buildings, banks, shopping malls, and restaurants—big and small—now retain their own platoon of security personnel. The number of private security guards in the country today easily dwarfs the combined personnel of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police.

The problem of poverty and the coping mechanisms it generates are systemic in nature. We will not overcome them by fencing off our neighbors, or hiring bodyguards to secure our children and our homes. Even acts of charity provide only short-term relief. What people need are regular jobs and steady livelihood that will enable them to provide for their families. They need land on which they can build their homes and where they won’t be constantly under threat of eviction. They need good schools for their children. They need to be able to look to a future that is kinder.

Each day, we respond to the problems spawned by poverty as if they were merely private troubles; we forego the chance to question the rules on which our dysfunctional way of life has been built. Instead of nurturing a stable nation, we breed a resentful people fragmented by the conventions of social exclusion.

Our political leaders continue to sleepwalk through this troubled landscape, lost in their fantasies about the wondrous effects of Charter change. They are programmed not to think beyond elections, and so they will never see the storm before them.

are we already taking steps towars the vision?

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The country as a whole, probably not. But you can do something for yourself. Take every opportunity to build up your skills and a “first world” kind of life should be well within your reach.

does that individual action motivate a greater development for the country as a whole??? i mean, isn't it when we start to improve our own selves that we begin to build a better nation?

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Most individuals don't have as much means to act in order to improve their standings so they can partake of emerging opportunities. These opportunities require certain pre-exisiting skills that are expensive and time-consuming to build. For example, there's a big difference between the payscale of a construction worker and a CRM professional. But being a CRM professional requires specialized education (college and masters), which is itself predicated on a decent elementary and HS education (math and science skills). But statistics show that majority of Grade 1 students drop out of school before they finish HS, and those that do finish HS aren't even qualified to attend college. They are effectively disqualified from many of the best opportunities.

It's different for you because you have an easier time improving your own prospects compared to most people. You already have the basic skills because you finished HS and your family can afford to give you a college education; you might even make it to grad school. This is not the case for majority of Filipinos your age, many of whom can't even read properly. They are playing with a handicap in a game where skills determine economic and social mobility.

but many of them are contented of what they have in the present. they seem to hold back themselves from getting out of poverty and living a better life. several adults don't have jobs & also don't try looking for anything to occupy. or if they do, they go for the illegal. women get pregnant too early and have undignified careers. many children don't even want to go to school.. generally, there's just a big discrepancy (or rather a lot of it) in the Filipino family culture, i think.

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Not really a matter of culture. The public school system (and many private schools) is itself inadequate; even the majority of those who manage to complete it graduate without the requisite skills. And it's not that they have a choice. For example, there are classrooms with as many as 80 to 100 students, even if the recommended number for a conducive learning environment is just 30 students. And only 19% of english teachers in public schools are qualified to teach the subject.

Those who drop out do so out of economic reasons. Remember that there are hidden costs attached to getting an education - meals, clothes, transpo, opportunitiy costs, etc. Those who come from poor families feel these hidden costs even more. They don't have assets to use for borrowing money in case they need money right away. They don't have health insurance in case a child gets sick; health expenses are paid out of pocket. That's why rich countries provide free meals, infirmary service and cash allowance to children from poor families so they can augment the hidden costs. Kids from poor families are more vulnerable to stopping their education if something happens with their families. The statistics that prove this are there.

And as for the jobs, the ones that will provide you with a relatively high standard of living require very sophisticated skills. You cannot have these skills unless you get a good elementary and HS education, followed up by excellent college and graduate education. How can a HS grad who flunks english and math proficiency tests aspire to be an American legal consultant or a CFA? What more those who drop out? The kinds of jobs that are available to lower-skilled workers (and there aren't a lot of these jobs) won't pay you enough to give you a "first world" financial status.