Can Philippine Economy Withstand Crisis in 2009?

The advanced capitalist countries are pushed to become all the more aggressive in pushing to open up neo-colonial countries as vents for their crisis. There are two particular areas of concern. The first is how the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and other creditors will exploit the situation to leverage further policy conditionalities through their loans and aid. The second is how free trade agreements (FTAs) will be packaged as solutions for slowing domestic economies. This includes not just FTAs between vastly unequal parties but also those packaged as intra-Third World deals that merely create regional production lines for the benefit of the big powers. All maneuvering such as these must be vigorously opposed.
The second stage involves laying the foundations for economic development and reducing internal and external vulnerabilities to inevitable crises.

The economy’s problems are far beyond piecemeal solutions. A radical change in socioeconomic policies is needed if there is going to be any hope of lifting the tens of millions of poor Filipinos out of their deprivation. This much is clear from the Philippine’s poor development experience and chronic poverty over the last six decades: the stubbornly elite-biased and increasingly “free market”-oriented policies are a development dead-end. Alternative socioeconomic policies must be geared towards what is strategically necessary to improve the economy and people’s welfare. In the concrete economic and political conditions of Philippine society today this can only mean genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization.