Has the economy moved forward with time?
A lookback at the past three decades
MANILA, Philippines — The more things change...
I joined The Philippine STAR during the term of FVR. I don’t remember the exact year, but it must have been around 1993. That was when the late Max Soliven asked me if I could write for The STAR. He said he wanted to beef up the business section with a column that explained business and economic issues plainly, as well as the intersection of economics and politics. He wanted a column that provided context to the day’s news.
Assuming I joined around 1993, this will be my 33rd year being part of the PhilSTAR family with my column, Demand and Supply. I was in my early forties then and full of enthusiasm about contributing to the task of making a better nation. I belong to that ‘70s generation, and the journalists of that era were confident we could use the written word to make change happen.
And those were tumultuous times. The year I became a cub reporter for ABS-CBN was the year when my fellow students at UP symbolically declared a separate republic in Diliman. A few years later, the first Marcos presidency declared martial law. It took 14 years before the silenced Philippine press became alive again. That was when The Philippine STAR was born.
That year was a rare moment in our history. We were all infused with unbelievable idealism. The founders of The Philippine STAR — Betty Go-Belmonte, Max Soliven, and Art Borjal — launched the paper committed to the Biblical teaching that the truth will set us free.
And so there we were, with extremely high hopes. I was ready to make the economic gobbledygook understandable to the layman.
Economic news was front-page stuff at that time. The economic mess left by BBM’s father couldn’t be ignored. We had the worst economic crisis since World War II, contracting by over 14 percent between 1983 and 1985. We suffered from record-high unemployment, hyperinflation that, according to the IMF, reached over 60 percent in 1984, a massive foreign debt and a population wallowing in poverty.
The Central Bank practically went bankrupt after being caught cooking its books. The government was forced to declare a moratorium on foreign debt payments, leading to currency devaluation, hyperinflation, and a severe shortage of basic goods.
By the time I joined The STAR, the country was suffering from crippling power failures and very violent military coups that, at one point, forced me to evacuate my family from our home outside Camp Aguinaldo. We, however, managed a peaceful transition of government from Cory Aquino to Fidel V. Ramos who won a presidential election by the thinnest of margins.
So, that was my playing field as defined by my publisher, Boss Max. It was one exciting time to be a journalist in our country. What more can a columnist ask?
Results. From our country’s leaders. I did not write all those columns three times a week for 33 years as an ego trip. I wrote in the belief that by explaining things to our people in simple language, our economy would move in the right direction. That didn’t happen much. Every time I look at some columns written 10, 20 years ago, it is clear that nothing much has changed. I could still print some of those columns today and sound current.
Let me cite a column I wrote on March 26, 2006. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had been president for five years. She holds a PhD in Economics from the UP School of Economics. We thought she was just what the doctor ordered for our sick economy.
Well… not quite. She was President for 10 years, the longest of any recent president. She unfolded her comprehensive economic blueprint through the Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan (MTPDP) 2004–2010.
One of her economic advisers was her student, Joey Salceda. Joey thought her economic plan sounded too technocratic. So Joey presented the broad strokes of what Arroyo promised to deliver:
"Arroyo super highways that are like the California freeways, fast-tracked integrated mass transit systems, education, scholarship program, speech labs, English textbooks, close the teacher-to-classroom deficit, mass housing program, tourism, refocusing DBP nautical highway package to tourism facilities, etc."
Absolutely none of those were delivered to make a difference.
As I wrote in that column, “it sounds too good to be true! Joey makes it sound too easy. It is as if she had the political will to do things other than protecting her tenure at Malacañang.”
On Jan. 3, 2011, with PNoy at Malacañang, I wrote a column that sounds eerily familiar today:
“Rising oil prices have a way of pushing up the inflation rate. Everyone will be using the excuse of rising oil prices to raise retail prices of everything… a lot of noise again about the need to nationalize the oil industry, as if this is a solution to the problem of rising oil prices. Some idiots want the government to stop the rise of oil prices as if it has the power to influence price movements in the world market… Government will have to fast-track the expansion of the LRT/MRT services to provide a reasonable alternative to driving a car.”
The result? The MRT was a big failure. No expansion happened in mass rapid transit, thanks to Mar Roxas and his acolyte, Jun Abaya.
Hay naku! This country had been at a standstill for 40 years. I may yet publish a collection of my columns, and I will entitle it: The mess we are leaving behind.
The change we were hoping for didn’t happen. Or as a 19th-century French journalist puts it, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Translated, that means even the most turbulent or seemingly progressive changes (such as political revolutions, technological shifts, or new leadership) often fail to alter underlying human behavior, institutional corruption, or structural realities.
Our tragedy is, no grand revolutions even happened. We just did nothing at all that mattered. We contemplated on our navels as our political leaders contemplated on their bank accounts. We nonchalantly watched our Southeast Asian neighbors speed past us.
And that’s our story.
Boo Chanco’s email address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on X @boochanco
