How come the Philippines are still poor in the 21st century?

Randy McDonald

 

A fan of cities, islands, migration and Trek and more Updated 3y

Originally Answered: How come the Philippines are still poor in the 21st century? Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and now China + India are rising in economic development.

In 2016, the Filipino news site Rappler produced a series of excellent articles looking at the economic effects of the Marcos era. The charts and graphs that came with these articles—for instance, “Marcos years marked 'golden age' of PH economy? Look at the data”—are revelatory.

The article “Were it not for Marcos, Filipinos today would have been richer

” demonstrates the extent to which the Philippines suffered a significant relative decline as a result of the kleptocracy of Marcos’ regime, taking two decades to recover from the dictator’s economic mismanagement and getting knocked back far behind the Philippines’ peers in the region.

The Philippines missed out entirely on the strong economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s that made the fellow Tiger Cub Economies

 of Thailand and Indonesia middle-income countries. Indeed, the once much poorer Vietnam has experienced very strong economic growth that has brought Vietnam close to Filipino levels of GDP per capita. The Philippines, now not a leader, is faced with the very difficult tasks of staying ahead of poorer countries which have records of sustained dynamism and of catching up to other richer ones.

The Filipino experience, frankly, is normal. There are plenty of cases in which countries recovering from dictatorships have taken a long time to get out from under the economic consequences of their misgovernment by dictators: Spain and Portugal began to do that starting in the 1970s, as did the countries of the Southern Cone starting in the 1980s, as did central and eastern Europe starting in the 1990s.

I am deeply skeptical of arguments suggesting that the Philippines’ low economic growth is evidence of some deeper flaw in Filipino culture, to (say) some sort of Latin Catholic inheritance. Looking at the 20th century history of the Philippines, I would argue that may have helped, for all we know; Ferdinand Marcos’ first term as president in 1965 saw him rule over one of the richest countries in Southeast Asia. It all depends on the degree to which the rule of Marcos, or someone like Marcos, was an inevitable outcome of Filipino political culture. Absent evidence that his kleptocratic dictatorship was inevitable, I would suggest that the relative poverty of the Philippines is simply a matter of having the bad luck to be misruled for two decades.