Cultural heritage may explain RP economic malaise--study
MANILA -- Poor Philippine economic performance may be due to a Latin cultural heritage giving rise to powerful political families pursuing their own rather than the state's interests, a new study has said.
Some 330 years of Spanish rule had influenced the Philippines greatly, an impact that survived nearly 50 years of later colonial occupation by the US, the study by Robert Nelson of the University of Maryland said.
This Spanish Catholic influence, in contrast to the US Protestant model, had led to a "dominant political role" by large landholding families in the Philippines just like in Latin America, Nelson said.
A weak government and powerful political oligarchies combined to put the state in the service of private interests, he added.
"If culture is now to be considered an important economic influence, it may be that this common Spanish Catholic heritage is a main contributing factor in the economic histories of the Philippines and most of Latin America," the study said.
These cultural attitudes "now stand in the way of freer markets and a more successful political democracy," said Nelson, who undertook the study as a visiting fellow at the University of the Philippines School of Economics.
In the 1950s, according to a World Bank study at the time, the Philippines was destined to become the region's second Japan.
But it missed out almost completely on the foreign investment-fuelled Asian boom of the 1970s to the 1990s, and by 2000 Filipino per capita income exceeded only Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea and Myanmar.
Particular problems like large fiscal deficits, inflation or corruption might be cited as reasons why the Philippines had failed to attract high levels of foreign investment, he said. But that failed to explain the policy failures behind those problems in the first place, he argued.
Some 330 years of Spanish rule had influenced the Philippines greatly, an impact that survived nearly 50 years of later colonial occupation by the US, the study by Robert Nelson of the University of Maryland said.
This Spanish Catholic influence, in contrast to the US Protestant model, had led to a "dominant political role" by large landholding families in the Philippines just like in Latin America, Nelson said.
A weak government and powerful political oligarchies combined to put the state in the service of private interests, he added.
"If culture is now to be considered an important economic influence, it may be that this common Spanish Catholic heritage is a main contributing factor in the economic histories of the Philippines and most of Latin America," the study said.
These cultural attitudes "now stand in the way of freer markets and a more successful political democracy," said Nelson, who undertook the study as a visiting fellow at the University of the Philippines School of Economics.
In the 1950s, according to a World Bank study at the time, the Philippines was destined to become the region's second Japan.
But it missed out almost completely on the foreign investment-fuelled Asian boom of the 1970s to the 1990s, and by 2000 Filipino per capita income exceeded only Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea and Myanmar.
Particular problems like large fiscal deficits, inflation or corruption might be cited as reasons why the Philippines had failed to attract high levels of foreign investment, he said. But that failed to explain the policy failures behind those problems in the first place, he argued.
Comments