Philippines By Any Other Name Is Still Philippines

But changing the name of a country like the Philippines won’t
eliminate its colonial legacy— a system of corruption and cronyism that a name change cannot hide or cover it up.

Since gaining independence in 1946, the Republic of the Philippines has been ruled by a “narrow elite” that promotes its own interests rather than the interests of the masses, which have been pushed into the violent world of the underground economy.

The ruling elite has set the country
o
n a turbulent course of volatile economic
progress
. Periods of rapid economic growth have been followed by economic and political setbacks. Then nation-wide poverty and government corruption settled in, preventing the Philippines from joining the ranks of the developed world.

In the 1960s, for instance, the Philippines economy was on a path to prosperity. It had the 
second highest per capita income in Asia, and was a trend sender for the Asia-Pacific
region
.

But prosperity didn’t last long. By the 1970s and ‘80s, the country’ economy began to stall, and
was
bypassed eventually by other Asian countries like South Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

“There was a time when the Philippines was seen as an Asian trendsetter, and fashionable young Malays would sport the barong, the formal embroidered shirt favored by Filipinos, to look cool,” 
writes Ruchir Sharma in Breakout Nations (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2012, p. 138). “But that was back in the 1960s, when the Philippines had the second highest per capita income in Asia, behind only Japan.
”

The nation’s fortunes
, says Sharma, have
shifted since then. “By the 1970s South Korea and Taiwan had passed the Philippines in per capita income terms. Malaysia and Thailand followed in the 1980s and China in the 1990s. Then in 2009, in a moment the Manila elite thought it would never see, Indonesia’s boom made Indonesians richer than Filipinos for the first time in history.”

The persistence of corruption and cronyism— cozy relations between a few wealthy families and government agencies, which create
d
monopolies and oligopolies in every key sector of the economy. They constrain economic progress and keep the cost of living high.

Transparency International assigns the Philippines a rank of 99 out of 175 countries ranked. Corruption Rank in the Philippines averaged 93.17 for the period 1995–2018, reaching an all-time high of 141 in 2008 and a record low of 36 in 1995.

In spite of more than seventy years of loud promises by “revolutionists” of all sorts, the country has yet to get rid of the many regulations that protect the interests of elite groups,

 nurture corruption and cronyism, and inhibit the development of an efficient infrastructure system and the spread the wealth to the population at large.

Though the Philippines does have a few honest leaders, fighting corruption and change of

institutions are never tasks that can be accomplished by a single leader with clean hands.– b
ecause these conditions are
a chronic disease of the Filipino governments, the institutions, and all political players.

Fighting corruption
is furthermore less than
a popular idea, as mentioned by Acemoglu and Robinson in Why Nations Fail: “There is no necessity for a society to develop or adopt the institutions that are best for economic growth or the welfare of its citizens, because other institutions may be even better for those who control politics and political institutions.”

Thus, it is not just the policy that each president of the Philippines has proposed that matter
s in
 fighting corruption. It is also the political institutions that each president use to come into power that needs to be changed in the lengthy journey of finding true democracy and transparency in the Philippines.

As long as these political institutions remain intact, the Philippines by any other name will still be the Philippines.