Poverty in the Philippines

Almost all third world countries experience poverty. Here in the Philippines, poverty is prevalent. The Philippine society is experiencing poverty right now. In my own estimate I must say that 50% of the Philippine population is on the poverty level. This people who is experiencing poverty is scattered around the Philippine archipelago. I believe will continue to increase if there is no intelligent social action between the government and the people.
Among the economies of East and Southeast Asia in the 1980s, the Philippines were exceptional: its economy was shrinking, not growing. Only after 1993 did the economy at last begin to grow strongly, and not at the rates achieved ten years earlier in the rest of Southeast Asia. Filipinos are justifiably proud of the recovery, but many regret the unfavorable comparison with their neighbors. At the same time, they can point out that relative positions have changed often over the centuries.
Before the arrival of the Spaniards in the mid-sixteenth century the archipelago was one of the few extensive areas in eastern Asia without a form of political state. It then became for a time the largest colonial area east of India, but at the end of the nineteenth century it was the first Asian colony to reject imperial control and proclaim an independent republic. Although that was immediately overthrown by the new imperial power of the USA, in 1946 the Philippines were the first East Asian colony to gain independence peacefully (that is, excluding the colonies freed from Japanese control). The independent Philippines became one of the first countries in the region, after Japan, to begin industrializing protected by tariffs and other barriers. By 1960 the values of its manufacturing output and of its exports exceeded those of Taiwan or the Republic of Korea. This was, though, more or less the peak of its comparative performance. Its growth continued in the 1970s but at rates ever further behind its neighbors, until the crisis of regression came in the 1980s. The economy was in a serious condition for a decade: major problems became obvious in 1981, grew very rapidly worse from 1983 to 1986 and were then stabilized but not entirely resolved.
This situation arose under the most explicitly developmentalist government in Philippine history, the twenty-year rule of President Marcos, who claimed that he had declared martial law in 1972 precisely to remove the political and bureaucratic obstacles to more rapid and egalitarian development. His government formulated many new policies, affecting all sectors of the economy, yet the sought-after transformation was achieved in very limited areas, while the economy as a whole slid into profound crisis. Businesses closed, workers were laid off and social unrest intensified.
Even after the fall of Marcos, political problems persisted, with a fissile Congress and seven attempted military coups against President Aquino. Not until 1993 did local and foreign investors regain enough confidence to renew investment on a significant scale, reviving growth and restructuring the economy further, with a fall in the incidence of poverty. The changes made after 1986 enabled the Philippines to survive the East Asian crisis of 1997-8 better than its neighbors, but growth remained spasmodic. Cronyism and corruption re-emerged at the highest levels, culminating in a new political and economic crisis in 2000-1, and President Estrada left office after his impeachment was aborted.
The worldwide focus on the last phase of the Marcos regime showed how the characters of the president, his wife and certain close associates had contributed to the crisis of the 1980s and to the incomplete restructuring, but the responsibility did not lie with them alone. Their rule was never absolute. Many other political and economic actors, including individuals and institutions within and outside the Philippines, made decisions that affected the national economy, through processes sometimes at the local or regional level, sometimes at the global level. Such decisions often had ambivalent results. Some undoubtedly contributed to the concentration of flows of income and wealth, to foreign indebtedness, to outflow of capital, to environmental degradation or to other problems. Even so, some decisions helped to diversify the economy, induced the acquisition of new skills, raised productivity in various industries and contributed to export earnings or replacement of imports. The impacts on different regions and on different categories of people varied, because of their characteristics and historical experiences. The Philippines is plural in character as well as in name (cf. Steinberg 1982). In other words, the varying patterns of change had both spatial and social elements. In some cases, change would be better described as regression than as development, so that the long-standing condition of uneven development continued.
This all suggests that, in order to understand the years of political and economic instability in the Philippines, and prospects for its future, it is necessary to look at the sources of uneven development. Social and spatial inequalities are, of course, normal, but each developing society has characteristics that make it different from all others. Therefore, certain structural and behavioral traits of Philippine society need to be examined.