US Financial Crisis: The Philippines’s Economic Debacle

Having produced only disastrous results, economic management can no longer be left in the hands of an elite corps of bureaucrats and technocrats who ape lock, stock and barrel models purposely to make corporate profits bigger at the expense of workers, farmers, and other marginal sectors.

By the Policy Study, Publication and Advocacy
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)
September 29, 2008

The opposing views proliferating in the media on whether the U.S. financial meltdown will have an extensive impact on the Philippine economy are expected and time may help settle this debate. By zeroing on the element of “impact”, however, these divergent views – voiced largely by economic authorities, bankers, and financial analysts – only miss the truth about the country’s economic anchors, a core issue that is hardly touched every time a financial crisis in the U.S. happens. They forget that neo-liberalism, enforced in most parts of the world by U.S.-led global capitalism, has left billions of people more marginalized and their lives more miserable by the day.

The Philippine economy has been fettered by prolonged unequal ties with its former colonial master – the U.S. - and by being made an appendage to global capitalism. This imbalanced relationship takes its roots, among others, in post-war onerous impositions, one-sided trade agreements, bitter debt payment programs, and unilaterally-enforced credit arrangements.

At the heart of this historical imposition is the Philippine presidency and its economic generals who have perpetuated this unequal relationship for decades, keeping the Philippines always at the receiving end of global capitalism’s periodic crisis. The current U.S. financial crisis - a result of the unregulated speculative financial sector leading to a housing mortgage mess and credit crunch - should compel everyone to reject this inherently disastrous economic model and work toward an independent, people-oriented economic policy.

“Dark age”

To begin with, the Arroyo government is lying through its teeth when it assures the business community not to fear as the country will ride out America’s financial meltdown even if this has all the makings of a second Great Depression or what European groups call a modern “dark age.” However, as early as January this year, even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) foresaw the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia – and other developing regions - as bearing the brunt of the global impact from a major economic slowdown in the U.S. The recession, the Fund said, will trigger a stiffer export competition from China at the expense of the Philippines and other export-driven countries in the region such as Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

Making a similar forecast, the economic intelligence center Euromonitor projected that the Philippines and other countries in Southeast Asia heavily dependent on exports to the U.S. will be hit by the economic slowdown as the export demand by the world’s biggest economy declines.

Indeed, the U.S. remains a major destination for Philippine exports. About 20 percent of the country’s exports go directly to the U.S. Another 50 percent of the exports go to Japan, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia but these are actually components assembled into products that end up in the U.S. market. All these mean that cuts on the U.S. export demand could be potentially devastating to 70 percent of the country’s exports.

Aside from export manufacturing, highly dependent on the U.S. market are the information technology-enabled industry and the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. In 2005 these accounted for 90 percent of BPO export revenues and over two-thirds of foreign equity.

At the receiving end

Each time the U.S. economy tumbles, the Philippines and the rest of the world are bumped aside. Being in the clutches of the U.S. economic hegemony since colonial times, however, the Philippines is at the receiving end of the crisis of capitalism that America passes on to small, developing countries and emerging economies.

To recall, America bought the Philippines from Spain at the end of the 19th century in the period of U.S. capitalist expansion and its conquests for market, cheap labor, and raw materials in Asia Pacific. A strong lobby mounted by U.S. producers against Philippine exports during the Great Depression of the 1930s led to the transition that ended with the granting of independence.

But the grant of independence in 1946 was conditioned upon onerous agreements that tied the Philippines to a “free trade” allowing the unrestricted entry of U.S. exports with parity rights for American citizens to exploit the country’s natural wealth, and own properties and strategic industries. Emerging from the war in control of more than half of the global wealth and awash with trade surpluses, America had to keep the Philippines and other countries in its grip where it could dump its excess commodities, exploit their cheap raw materials, expand finance capital operations, and extend a new-found military hegemony. Accordingly, national security doctrines during the period emphasized the importance of maintaining a pro-U.S. government in the Philippines that would guarantee America’s over-arching economic and military objectives.

Over the next 60 years, the Philippines’ economic dependence on the U.S. gave birth to treaties and policies allowing the entrenchment of U.S. strategic enterprises and investments, the export of raw commodities, heavy reliance on foreign investments, and the elimination of protectionism. This neo-colonial structure maintained the system of landlordism and a bourgeoisie that depended on the plunder of natural resources and export of cheap raw commodities. As a result, the local economy became lethargic and generally backward, unable to shield itself from the rise and fall of an increasingly globalized economy where modern agriculture, a strong industrial base, and protective barriers are the keys to survival.