How difficult is it to do business in the Philippines in comparison to other economies?

The issue of education quality has just been highlighted by reports on the Department of Education’s (DepEd) participation in the 2018 cycle of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Implemented by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), PISA tests students’ ability to apply knowledge they gained from formal education to “everyday situations.”

Pinoys are punny.

AS SCIENTIFIC terms go, “climate change” is lame. It sounds like something created by committee. And it’s hard to understand as a crisis when we also hear scientists talking about ice ages and other natural changes to the climate happening throughout earth’s history. “Global warming” is something people have worried about for years, though. It’s essentially another term for the same thing, but conveys a planet-wide danger.

HONG KONG — China’s political system has weak immunity to viruses. A bungled swine flu cover-up doubled pork prices last year. Now a mysterious outbreak of pneumonia is panicking citizens just days before the start of what’s usually a $150 billion spending boom: the lunar new year holiday. President Xi Jinping’s corruption purge may have made officials less venal, but not, apparently, more credible.

INVESTORS KEEP flocking to private equity in Asia even though returns are declining. They should take heed: Payouts are likely to get worse from here, rather than better.

Dear friends, data is staring us in the face. For the past three years, foreign direct investments have consistently gone down, from $10.3 billion in 2017 to $9.8 billion in 2018, and are projected to fall further to $6.9 billion in 2019, or 33% decrease from the 2017 level. Indeed, our $6.9 billion 2019 FDIs will only be about one-third of Vietnam’s $20.4 billion and nearly one-fourth less than Indonesia’s $24 billion foreign investments in 2019.

Social Weather Stations’ (SWS) survey last December revealed that 76% of Filipinos see many human rights abuses in President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on illegal drugs. The SWS report prompted Philippine Star columnist Boo Chanco to ask on Facebook if people are turning a blind eye to these human rights abuses when they give President Duterte a high rating.

Philippine universities do not seem to fare well even compared to many of their ASEAN neighbors. The Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) world university ranking is a good annual report, its scoring is based on six indicators: Academic peer review, 40%; Faculty/Student ratio; 20%, Citations per faculty; 20%, Employer reputation; 10%, and International student ratio and International staff ratio, 5% each.

THE PHRASE “low maintenance” is usually applied to landscaping gardens. It is an option offered to a homeowner who can’t be bothered with too much work tending the greenery. It is ideal for some to have a garden that can be left pretty much alone for long periods and requiring little attention. Such daily chores as watering, pruning, and spraying of insecticides are seldom required if at all.

RECENTLY, the Department of Energy (DoE) called for comments on the draft Qualified Third Party (QTP) Service Contract and Eligibility Requirement as per Department Circular No. DC2019-11-0015 “Prescribing Revised Guidelines for Qualified Third Party.” These draft issuances are supplemental documents to support the QTP Revised Guideline Policy which the DoE released on November 2019. The QTP Guideline Policy is an initiative that was prescribed in Republic Act No. 9136, otherwise known as the Electric Power Industry Reform Act of 2001, which shall assist the Distribution Utilities (DU) in ensuring and accelerating the total electrification of the country.

It’s becoming ever more clear that our dysfunctional, weak, inefficient, and corrupt bureaucracy is a binding constraint to growth and development. It belongs up there together with our low agricultural productivity, labor rigidities, and monopolies in strategic industries as major constraints for the country to attain its true growth potential.