We hope…but don’t hold your breath. We’ve been hearing a lot of rumblings about how great the Philippine economy is doing. The World Bank through its country director for the Philippines, Motoo Konishi stated that "The Philippines is no longer the sick man of Asia, but a rising tiger." And lately there are plenty of bright spots to point to, the most important of which is the country’s GDP (gross domestic product) growth: 6.6 percent in 2012—the highest in Southeast Asia—beating even the government’s high-end target of six percent.
Even tourist arrivals are up despite Hong Kong’s continued blacklisting of the country as a tourist destination since the 2010 Manila hostage crisis where 8 Chinese tourists were killed. And the Philippine Peso is now stronger than it has been since 2008—to the consternation of millions of OFWs who have seen the value their remittances steadily decline over time.
So are we seeing the start of the Philippines as a major economic player in the region, another Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, or maybe another Singapore? Well, as we stated earlier: don’t hold your breath because it is unlikely to happen anytime soon…probably not in our lifetime.
Why? Because sadly, Philippine society and culture leave much to be desired! Since America returned the islands back to the Filipinos almost 70 years ago there has been talk about the Philippines becoming a Southeast Asian powerhouse—and back then we were already way ahead of any of our neighbors. Instead we Filipinos dropped the ball and slowly but surely our Southeast Asian neighbors began surging ahead of us.
As a society, we need to do some honest-to-goodness soul-searching. A country does not go from first to almost last purely by accident. You almost have to make an effort to drop to the bottom the way we did. Do we, as a nation just have mediocre goals and aspirations? We seem satisfied to have our youth go abroad to work as maids or street sweepers. We are okay with the fact that millions of squatters live in stomach-turning squalor? We have slowly denuded our forests, polluted our rivers, fouled our air and we’re fine with all that. Manila, the once proud and most cosmopolitan of Southeast Asian cities is today a dirty, crowded, smelly eyesore that foreigners and even locals avoid—and even that doesn’t seem to bother us one bit. Are we indeed a society with such low expectations?
In the mid sixties, national artist Nick Joaquin addressed the same issues we talk about here in a telling article titled: A Heritage of Smallness. In it Joaquin laments our societal and cultural predisposition towards the small or tingi as well as our preference for always taking the easy way out. Today, half a century later you can still buy cigarettes by the stick or shampoo in a tiny single-use sachet. Centuries ago other nations were already building large, ocean-going vessels, yet Filipinos have never seen the need to create anything larger than jumbo-sized bancas. Sure, we helped build Spanish galleons then, and today we’re building ships in Subic Bay, but both those instances have been foreign owned and managed endeavors.
While there are always exceptions, Filipino society can generally be described as “lazy.” Many locals who have lived in the West and return home are often appalled by the slow and casual attitude Filipinos have towards work. Have something made and it usually takes longer than it should…and when you finally get it, the quality and workmanship is often disappointing.
It is thus not surprising that Cambodia and Myanmar for the first time last year surpassed the Philippines in Foreign Direct Investments (FDI). Global investors have grown weary of the Philippines as its disadvantages are starting to significantly outweigh its advantages. According to UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Investments), FDI to the Philippines in 2012 dropped to a paltry .5 billion. By comparison, Singapore, a country roughly the size of Laguna de Bay in Luzon received .4 billion in Foreign Investments last year.
In the end, it boils down to a failure in education. Since we know what our problems are, we should have long ago devised curriculums that addressed and corrected those problems. But neither public schools nor the much-ballyhooed Catholic schools have bothered to do so. And so our problems remain.
As an example: after World War II the term “made in Japan” meant a product was cheap and substandard, a low-quality item that would likely end up in the trash. Akio Morita, the founder of Sony Corporation early on realized that to succeed in the global marketplace, Sony’s products had to be the very best in order to overcome that negative perception. During in his years at the helm, he saw to it that Sony produced nothing but the very best. In the end, not only did he transform his small company into a global giant, he was instrumental as well in changing the global perception of what “made in Japan” meant. That is the kind of drive the Philippines needs if it is ever to become “world class.” In essence, we need to remake who we are as a people. Until then all this talk about becoming an Asian Tiger or a world-class player is nothing but a pipe dream. So don’t hold your breath, instead roll-up your sleeves and help change the culture.
Source: http://www.philnews.com/