TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT
BY JUN PRADO

Sick man of Asia – Why?

It is often a source of embarrassment to Filipinos when we are reminded, more often than not by other Filipinos, that the Philippines used to enjoy the second highest standard of living in Asia, next only to Japan’s.

Certainly, at the outbreak of the Second World War in the Pacific in December 1941, the Philippines enjoyed the second highest literacy rate in Asia, next again to Japan ’s.

This was a direct inheritance from the Americans who had set up in this, their only colony in Asia a university system of public education, patterned after their own, which gave many an aspiring Filipino, from even the poorest family some measure of social mobility.

By the time the Philippines regained its independence in July 1946, it was enjoying what no other country in Asia, again with the exception of Japan, enjoyed thousands of university graduates, including several hundreds who had graduated from top American universities.

This was an embarrassment of riches in human resources that could be found neither in Malaya (now Malaysia ), the Netherlands east Indies (now Indonesia ), French Indo-China (now Vietnam , Laos and Cambodia ), Siam (now Thailand ), Burma (now Myanmar ), Formosa (now Taiwan ), nor in Korea.

If human resources were the sole determinant of economic growth, then the Philippines, with its deep and wide pool of university graduates, would have developed much faster than its neighbors, who had such paucity in educational facilities that they sent many of their young men and women to Philippine universities to acquire knowledge and expertise in engineering, medicine, dentistry, accounting, auditing, architecture, agriculture, business administration and other fields.

But our advantage in human resources failed to propel us to rapid economic growth. On the contrary, almost all our neighbors have overtaken us even though their starting pools of human resources were markedly inferior to ours. So much so that for the past decades or so we have suffered the indignity if being called the Sick Man of Asia and have had to export our excess stock of human talents to do menial jobs for our over-achieving neighbors.

What happened? Where did we go wrong?One possible reason that has not been given adequate attention is the smallness of our Chinese population and its implication for our entrepreneurial spirit – or lack of it.Ethnic Chinese, for example, make up 77 percent of the population in Singapore , 32 percent in Malaysia , 14 percent in Thailand , 3 percent in Indonesia , but only 1.5 percent in the Philippines.

It is probably not a coincidence that economic growth and prosperity are also in that order.But by far the biggest single reason for our economic failure, in my opinion, is our wrong choice in economy strategy.

In short, our failure to build an export economy early in the game is the ultimate reason.

LIFE LINES

Sign seen on the maternity ward door of the Aklan Provincial Hospital : “Push! Push! Push!”