It’s delightful to spend long weekends in Greece, an easy drive from the writer’s base in Eastern Europe. He tells his Greek friends that he’d rather do the Athens metro than the New York subway; and is very happy for them. (A travel writer waxing poetic should be credited for the title of this blog.)
Greece poured tons of (borrowed) money to upgrade Athens’ infrastructure in preparation for the 2004 Summer Olympics. But fast-forward to 2010, Greece is one of the sick children of the EU – their public debt way beyond their ability to pay.
Back home, is the Aquino Administration in a pleasing mode – i.e., to please everybody? (Spain tried that with their energy initiative and today are paying the price.) Our capital market is large enough to fund our infrastructure program and/or we could go the debt route? That would ensure that we maintain ownership of these projects – and that is not bad. It is ideal. But there is something fundamental in major economic endeavors, and put simply it is: run the numbers!
What have we been doing all these years . . . decades? Ensuring ownership and borrowing money? And what have we to show? Under-development and a debt-service that eats a big chunk of our economic output – and thus the administration is keeping a tight rein on expenditures? While we wonder when we would make good on our MDGs? (And we’re compassionate so these goals are consuming us? Yet even the OECD is telling member countries that sound economic fundamentals are the key, not palliatives and sound bites?)
Growing up is never easy – i.e., learning from the past? We have to stop behaving like kids in a candy store? We can’t have all the candies to ourselves? It is not only a lesson from the loaves and fishes, it is also fundamental in strategy and competitiveness. That means accessing and leveraging scarce resources from wherever – in order to respond to the ever-changing want of man; and it includes a high-population growth in our case? That is the bottom line if we expect to attain global competiveness? (The writer is a practitioner and any inference to academic discourse is not intentional – the point to make is there are fundamentals and general knowledge that apply to the real world; or why motivational speakers talk about ‘stopping and smelling the roses’.)
We have to start thinking with ‘the end in view’ . . . as opposed to linear thinking – where step-by-step logic is the stricture? The end in view for us is to be a developed economy? And developed economies like Singapore and Hong Kong don’t think about making-do but instead how to be in the driver’s seat? And that means being globally competitive? To be globally competitive we have to move beyond analyzing the global yardstick of global competitiveness and instead think and behave like one?
The business community wants the administration to update them on their road map; but given our traditional thought process of step-by-step logic it is not surprising if between them there is an inherent communication gap – because they’re talking about the means but not the end? The good news is the JFC (Joint Foreign Chambers) are ready to present their agenda to the Aquino Administration – it talks about the end: $75 billion in incremental investments in strategic industries (that will be globally competitive?), and given multiplier effect should yield over $100 billion in incremental GDP? Now we’re talking – i.e., that should put us at par with the Thailands of the world and they have a better poverty picture than we do?
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