IT only takes a sustained growth of 7 percent in GNP for seven continuous years for the Philippines’ poor to cross the threshold to middle-class status in about 10 years, even assuming that income distribution remains unchanged.
This is the thesis of Speaker Jose de Venecia in a booklet that sounds like an aircraft or a racing car formula: "747.’’ It’s something that economists can chew on, and more important, it’s the "vision’’ and "platform’’ that presidential candidates can ride on in this election year.
Achieving the target is admittedly difficult but not impossible, given that our neighbors have achieved and even exceeded it.
Throughout the 80s, according to the speaker, Philippine GNP growth averaged 6.9 percent; South Korea, 9.1 percent; Taiwan, 8.8 percent; and Singapore, 7.3 percent. In the 90s, Thailand and Malaysia grew between 6.1 and 10.3 percent.
The World Bank estimated that absolute poverty declined from 18 percent to only 2 percent in Malaysia and from 26 percent to 16 percent in Thailand.
You may joke, as I did before Le Club, the French business chamber, that our trouble is that we don’t have enough Malaysians, Thais, Taiwanese, and Singaporeans, but there’s a way of doing it.
Take the Indonesians – whose economy is not held up as a model – who, through rural development programs that brought high-value crops, fertilizer subsidies, and off-farm incomes – brought down poverty from 60 percent in 1970 to only 11 percent in 1996. China, of course, lifted the lives of 270 million people in what is called "the greatest mass emancipation from poverty the world has ever seen.’’
It’s not as if we haven’t had any experience of growth. The reason FVR stands out among recent presidents is that during his watch, the economy managed a respectable 5.8 percent growth in 1996 from zero growth in 1992. Despite the intervention of the East Asian financial crisis, the economy generated two million new jobs and reduced poverty by two percent a year.
The success of the Ramos presidency was due to a creative combination of executive purpose and legislative initiative.
