Delightfully, our biggest export generator, electronics, is stepping up to the plate. Reports the Manila Bulletin (June 2nd): “Electronics investments may hit $1-billion this year, but the industry needs between $5-billion to $10-billion to move the industry to the next level of technology products and become globally competitive.
And the report continues, “Arthur J. Young Jr., chairman SEIPI, said that if Vietnam could generate $10 billion electronics investments, there is no stopping the Philippines from achieving the same rate of inflows given all the right government support and investment climate.
“SEIPI is completing an six-year industry roadmap for presentation to the new government in August. It will be a detailed growth plan and industry direction to push the industry forward by aggressively courting big multinational companies to invest here.”
Hopefully the BPO industry and agri-business sector (that reaches the countryside) would develop similar roadmaps – because they are among the major industries identified as strategic. For example, the JFC or Joint Foreign Chambers are focusing on 7 major industries that could generate as much as $75 B in investments. And they include: creative industries, infrastructure and logistics, mining, and tourism.
We’re playing catch-up in a major way that we truly need to focus on the vital few – or why the genius of the Great Commandments is a great lesson for the humankind, beyond the Pharisees and Scribes. Traditionally our investment priorities were meant to be inclusive, a terminology we seem to like – because it fits to a t our culture of inclusion and compassion? But in investment and global competition, that is like opting for a big number of ‘bolos’ against cal 45s? And our forefathers learned how the dynamic worked against them . . . and why in the 21st century Filipinos are still crying for water and electricity!
Another welcome news quoting a former government official is: we are now recognizing that compassion is not what will address the problem of unemployment and poverty. An industry that is competitively capitalized and invested and developing and marketing competitive and compelling products will generate the requisite economic activity that will provide employment. And it must be employment derived locally not employment focused on the promotion of OFWs.
We better start using the terminology brain drain again – so that there’s no confusion that economic initiatives that can take our focus away from (strategic) investment and industrialization can’t be the bedrock of our economy, i.e., they are a sub-optimized choice that is uncompetitive in a globalized economy? For example: (a) we can’t be gun shy with industrialization – i.e., we don’t want to share what we have in abundance with foreign investors and so they don’t want to share what they have in abundance too?; and (b) then make do with OFWs? Making-do at the expense of brain drain is not an equitable exchange?
The bottom line: a consumption-driven economy with a weak infrastructure/industrial base – thus uncompetitive – does not generate sufficient output to overcome such weakness! The dynamic does not compute: $18 B OFW remittances, >$100 B local economy; <$50 B exports, 14.3% gross investment . . . net a GDP (PPP) per person of only $3,300, or one-tenth that of developed economies, thus we’re underdeveloped!
Foreign investment is a competitive advantage as a relatively new market-economy entrant, Vietnam, has experienced (and the Asian tigers before them) – i.e., they’re developing faster than we are driven largely by greater foreign investments that are 2 X ours; their exports are at 1.5 X, while our poverty is 2.6 X theirs!
A swallow doesn’t make a summer . . . but the writer is keeping his fingers crossed that we would follow-up – and in a big, bold way – on the lead of the SEIPI!
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