(This article asks the question: can we be barking at the wrong tree?)
“It is not all the fault of governments. The region's unwieldy conglomerates could do more to help themselves achieve global scale by concentrating on fewer businesses. Some are doing so, but others still seem unable to resist poking their fingers into another pie . . . San Miguel of the Philippines, a big beer-to-food conglomerate, recently talked of trying its hand at generating electricity. . . This dilettantism was once summed up damningly by Michael Porter, of Harvard Business School: “These companies don't have strategies, they do deals.” Gerry Ambrose in the Kuala Lumpur office of Aberdeen Asset Management laments that it is indeed hard to find Malaysian companies with “a business plan that will last ten years”. Many firms have improved their profitability since the 1997-98 crisis but that may not guarantee their long-term survival. Because even the best-run firms often have boards and shareholder lists dominated by the founding family and their friends, it is hard to believe that their thinking will change.” That shortened quotation is from: The Economist; Business in South East Asia; February 28, 2008. But see how Taiwan is progressing: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/technology/companies/04compute.html?hpw
In the meantime, are we instinctively looking backward – to Garcia, Macapagal or Marcos – to seek answers to our frustrations? Or is the ideology of a few getting in the way of pragmatism? How many more decades do we want to invoke our handicap to drum up protectionism, a self-fulfilling prophecy? There is nothing wrong with “Buy Filipino”, but we have to disabuse our mind that we should keep to a 4-cylinder engine when the race rules allow 6 cylinders and bigger. Do we risk being marginalized in the age of global competition in an interconnected world?
Are we barking at the wrong tree? Should we channel and expend our efforts to more forward-looking, positive endeavors?
We’ve made mistakes . . . but that’s past. What is staring us in the eye now is: we are the least competitive in the region. It is imperative that we become competitive to drive our GDP. Our local economy as it stands is larger than that of Malaysia or Thailand; our shortfall and opportunity is in exports. Thailand is a good benchmark with a population closer to ours than Malaysia; Thailand’s exports are more than 3X ours.
That is our problem-definition, not that capitalism is in its death throes, e.g., Russia still has 23 billionaires down from 53, but who is counting – they would have more if they expand their industry beyond oil? Or is nationalism threatened by the free-market? The Japanese owned the Rockefeller Plaza and Pebble Beach Resorts/Golf Links for a period of time. And Germans owned Chrysler for a brief time as well. These are American icons. And so they bought them back! Again, it is not ideology, it is pragmatic economics. But what may be true is that the global financial crisis may not turnaround robustly or until the system finds the right balance between prudence/regulation and dynamism, i.e., in the meantime capital flows will decelerate, and that means we better get our act together as we may be facing an even bigger challenge.
(If we want a constructive debate, should we then debate why we are among the most corrupt countries – it is a big drag on the economy, has torn our moral fiber and it needs mending – and then deal with it? For instance, can newspapers, radio and TV stations devote dedicated space/time for people to submit answers to questions like: Where does a corrupt act begin? Can we trace its path? How do we stop it? Who will stop it? When? And periodically the host can boil the answers down into some coherent actionable initiative for the people to act on them?)
But to move forward, we better figure out how to cover the gap in our GDP – exports – by being competitive?
“It is not all the fault of governments. The region's unwieldy conglomerates could do more to help themselves achieve global scale by concentrating on fewer businesses. Some are doing so, but others still seem unable to resist poking their fingers into another pie . . . San Miguel of the Philippines, a big beer-to-food conglomerate, recently talked of trying its hand at generating electricity. . . This dilettantism was once summed up damningly by Michael Porter, of Harvard Business School: “These companies don't have strategies, they do deals.” Gerry Ambrose in the Kuala Lumpur office of Aberdeen Asset Management laments that it is indeed hard to find Malaysian companies with “a business plan that will last ten years”. Many firms have improved their profitability since the 1997-98 crisis but that may not guarantee their long-term survival. Because even the best-run firms often have boards and shareholder lists dominated by the founding family and their friends, it is hard to believe that their thinking will change.” That shortened quotation is from: The Economist; Business in South East Asia; February 28, 2008. But see how Taiwan is progressing: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/technology/companies/04compute.html?hpw
In the meantime, are we instinctively looking backward – to Garcia, Macapagal or Marcos – to seek answers to our frustrations? Or is the ideology of a few getting in the way of pragmatism? How many more decades do we want to invoke our handicap to drum up protectionism, a self-fulfilling prophecy? There is nothing wrong with “Buy Filipino”, but we have to disabuse our mind that we should keep to a 4-cylinder engine when the race rules allow 6 cylinders and bigger. Do we risk being marginalized in the age of global competition in an interconnected world?
Are we barking at the wrong tree? Should we channel and expend our efforts to more forward-looking, positive endeavors?
We’ve made mistakes . . . but that’s past. What is staring us in the eye now is: we are the least competitive in the region. It is imperative that we become competitive to drive our GDP. Our local economy as it stands is larger than that of Malaysia or Thailand; our shortfall and opportunity is in exports. Thailand is a good benchmark with a population closer to ours than Malaysia; Thailand’s exports are more than 3X ours.
That is our problem-definition, not that capitalism is in its death throes, e.g., Russia still has 23 billionaires down from 53, but who is counting – they would have more if they expand their industry beyond oil? Or is nationalism threatened by the free-market? The Japanese owned the Rockefeller Plaza and Pebble Beach Resorts/Golf Links for a period of time. And Germans owned Chrysler for a brief time as well. These are American icons. And so they bought them back! Again, it is not ideology, it is pragmatic economics. But what may be true is that the global financial crisis may not turnaround robustly or until the system finds the right balance between prudence/regulation and dynamism, i.e., in the meantime capital flows will decelerate, and that means we better get our act together as we may be facing an even bigger challenge.
(If we want a constructive debate, should we then debate why we are among the most corrupt countries – it is a big drag on the economy, has torn our moral fiber and it needs mending – and then deal with it? For instance, can newspapers, radio and TV stations devote dedicated space/time for people to submit answers to questions like: Where does a corrupt act begin? Can we trace its path? How do we stop it? Who will stop it? When? And periodically the host can boil the answers down into some coherent actionable initiative for the people to act on them?)
But to move forward, we better figure out how to cover the gap in our GDP – exports – by being competitive?
No comments:
Post a Comment