BBM for health? Not really

Disyembre 17, 2024

The lack of essential health facilities reflects the broader deficiencies in the country’s healthcare infrastructure and its inability to provide adequate care to millions of Filipinos, particularly the poor.

2025 BBM: Budget Badly Made

Disyembre 17, 2024

The government easily decides on austerity for the poor, yet just as easily decides to give huge budgets for pork and patronage, infrastructure for the rich, and even sacred debt service.

Rate expectations: Rethinking PH credit ratings

Disyembre 12, 2024

The economic managers don’t seem to realize that credit ratings are just, well, credit ratings. These shouldn’t be overstated as any kind of measure of economic performance or much less of national development.

The Long Game of Development (3)

Disyembre 8, 2024

We can’t neglect the most important strategy of democratic mass mobilizations to shift the balance of power and policies towards the majority.

The Long Game of Development (2)

Disyembre 8, 2024

From the 18th century and the first industrial revolution, how much have great leaps in technologies really contributed to fixing social underdevelopment? The expanding poverty and vulnerability of billions of people gives an answer.

The Long Game of Development

Disyembre 8, 2024

The current era remains fundamentally neoliberal in essence, agenda and practice – state power over the economy is still systematically wielded for the benefit of a few. In particular, the so-called market reforms that have made capitalist elites so prosperous remain in place.

PH “upper middle-income status” is just a number and a fantasy

Disyembre 1, 2024

The measure of being an upper-middle income country refers to an average that completely obscures the conditions of the majority. UMIC doesn’t really mean development in its most important sense of the well-being of people.

Are foreign investments in water what we need?

Nobyembre 13, 2024

FEATURES

The government’s water supply and sanitation map declares the need for further private sector involvement and implies more foreign participation. But will this solve the country’s water predicament?

BBM admin to foreigners: Take our land, please

Nobyembre 12, 2024

COMMENTARY

The proposal to increase the land lease limit to 99 years really won’t make much difference in making the Philippines more attractive to foreign investment, and certainly won’t mean anything for long-term economic development.