Small minds

National Artist Nick Joaquin, in Culture and History, a book he wrote in 1988, wondered if our mindset for smallness is responsible for our inability to address the growing needs of our people.

- BOO CHANCO

The depressing fact in Philippine history, he rued, is what seems to be our native aversion to the large venture, the big risk, the bold extensive enterprise.

We blame our colonizers for many of our current problems but according to Joaquin, it was the colonial years that “there was actually an advance in freedom, for the unification of the land, the organization of towns and provinces and the influx of new ideas, started our liberation from the rule of the petty, whether of clan, locality or custom.”

I was going through a recent paper of Prof. Jesus Felipe and some economists at the De La Salle University and some of his comments on our Viber thread. Failure of policy, possibly because of small thinking, caused us to lose our status as the second-best economy in Southeast Asia. We landed on our ass down in the pits.

“Marcos Sr. tried to imitate the industrialization program of Korea,” Dr. Felipe wrote. “It failed due to policy mistakes. The implementation was very poor and the government failed to push exports. The program was financed with dollars....and the 1980s crisis hit us.

“Korea’s autocrat simply made the same decision that every single nation that has attained high income made: industrialize... Who would have thought 10 years ago that Vietnam (a planned, inefficient economy) would overtake us?

“The reason? They focused on manufacturing... Vietnam is also corrupt. That’s what we need to understand: failure is due to policy mistakes...

“The Philippines did not have the carrot and stick incentives that Korea had. Markets were protected but we had no push to export (wrong incentives, etc).”