By HERBERT VEGO
EACH time President Benigno Simeon “Noynoy” Aquino III paints a glowing picture of the country’s “prosperity” because of tuwid na daan, the poor can only shake their heads, wondering whether he is referring to New Zealand.
Well, how can we argue against the Philippines’ 7.8 percent gross domestic product (GDP) growth? GDP refers to the annual domestic output of a country, including exports. The climbing percentage is therefore measured against the previous year’s output, hence not indicative of the general population’s economic productivity.
In fact, nine of the top 10 GDP performers in the latest list of the Economic Intelligence Unity of the United States are “poor nations” by world standard.
As published in a recent issue of the Washington Post, here are the 10 countries that are expected to have the most economic growth in 2014, ranked from first to last by percentage of GDP growth:
(1) Mongolia, 15.3 percent;
(2) Sierra Leone, 11.2 percent;
(3) Turkmenistan, 9.2 percent;
(4-5) Two-way tie: Bhutan, 8.8 percent; Libya, 8.8 percent;
(6-8) Three-way tie: Iraq, 8.5 percent; Laos, 8.5 percent; Timor-Leste, 8.5 percent;
(9) Eritrea, 8.0 percent;
(10) Zambia, 7.9 percent
You will note that all of these countries, with the exception of Libya, are very poor. In most of them, economic growth is driven by oil or any other natural resources. Many of the booms come from the sale of those natural resources to developing countries.
A very poor country growing rich because of a single natural resource is nothing new, to cite Saudi Arabia as the best example, which has been transformed by a half-century of selling oil to Western countries.
Top-ranked Mongolia has been the world’s fastest-growing economy since 2012, resulting from the massive sale of its mineral resources to China. The country’s families that have been nomadic for centuries have now homes of their own.
But on the local front, as far Juan dela Cruz who does not feel the trickles of prosperity is concerned, the President’s glowing boast sounds Greek.
We have heard enough of broken promises from PNoy. We have seen enough of graft and corruption, but not a stretch of tuwid na daan.
I wonder how many of us remember the words he said when he ran for President against his cousin Gilberto “Gibo” Teodoro in 2010. He said, “This will be a fight of good versus evil.”
The allusion to “evil” was in the sense that Teodoro was the candidate of the then outgoing President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Gibo, were he not a gentleman, could have reminded PNoy that the battle between good and evil only refers to the battle between God and Satan.
Has PNoy vanquished Satan in four years of his administration?
Considering the current population of the country which is a hundred million people occupying an archipelago of 115,830 square miles, the fact is that with more mouths to feed than we can afford, our average per-person income or gross national product (GNP) – that is, value of all goods produced annually divided by number of people – is only around US $1,000 or P44,000 per year or P3,666 per month. Oh no!
Worse, since 90 percent of the country’s wealth is in the hands of only 10 percent of the population, the poorest of the poor cannot eat three square meals a day.
Compare our GNP to that of Denmark, a smaller nation with a population of only seven million people, and you will gasp in awe. Denmark has a towering GNP of US $27,000. That’s 27 times of our own!/PN
