I attended the Managing and Teaching Business Ethics conference at Lassalle-Haus, Bad Schönbrunn, Canton of Zug, Switzerland, from May 13 to 16, 2018. The conference aimed to strengthen both the theoretical discourse and the practice of corporate ethics. This conference is year two of a three-year event. The first was held here in the Philippines for the Asia-Pacific Region, and was hosted by Ateneo de Manila University. This year’s conference was hosted by Lassalle-Haus for the European and African region, and next year’s event will be at Sta. Clara University, California, for the Americas.

Yesterday, a lecture on “Capitalism and inclusion under weak institutions” was delivered by national scientist Dr. Raul Fabella, my former professor at UP School of Economics and fellow columnist here in BusinessWorld. Another columnist Romy Bernardo mentioned the lecture in his column here last Monday.

FOR THE PAST few days, we have seen once again the spectacle of candidates filing their candidacy for elective posts in the 2019 mid-term elections. The faces and surnames of most of the serious candidates are familiar to us. This spectacle shows the same people who keep on coming back for reelection, including a few of them who had been indicted for misuse of money. It also made manifest the recycling of family members into elective posts: son or daughter in place of a parent or vice versa; a spouse for the other spouse; a sibling in place of another sibling; several members of the family running simultaneously for elective posts. And the most shameful of all: close relatives running for No. 1 and No. 2 positions in the same political jurisdiction.

Political contestation is one of the major components of a democratic setup. It involves challenging the position of incumbent and outgoing leaders of government at the national, congressional, and local levels. In particular, electoral contestation has been recognized as the regular form of political contest and has been recognized to represent electoral democracy.

With the alarming increase of mental health illnesses today, with more than 300 million people suffering from depression alone according to the World Health Organization, the enactment of Republic Act No. 11032 or the Mental Health Act last 20 June 2018 is a boon to Filipinos. It is an affirmation of the basic right of all Filipinos to mental health as well as the fundamental rights of people who require mental health services.

As a former screenwriter in Philippine cinema from the late Fifties to the early Eighties, the one film I wish I could have written is The Battle of Manila, presented a-la Rashomon, that classic Japanese motion picture about a killing, recounted from different perspectives.

ONLY WEEKS AGO, the world’s leading climate scientists warned that 2˚C of global warming would have even worse impacts than anticipated. The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for a more rapid decarbonization of the global economy to limit warming to 1.5˚.

Women, Peace and Security (WPS) in the country has been a political project for both civil society and government. Taking off from the global agenda of advancing women’s human rights in the context of armed conflict and conflict transformation, commitment to WPS has been institutionalized through several National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security (NAP WPS): the first generation covering 2010-2016, the second generation that introduced amendments in 2014, and the third generation that includes the period from 2017 to 2022.

For most Filipino companies, diversity and inclusion (D&I) is hardly a top priority. Although Corporate Philippines generally welcomes women and LGBT into the workforce -- unlike other societies where they are overtly excluded -- there is hardly any effort to ensure that office rules and policies promote D&I.

WHAT is it? Let’s say you were born with the gift of knowing how to drive but had never driven on the streets. Then the traffic policemen, who guide you, through the mean streets of Metro Manila with all their support systems and rules are “facilitating” your process of reaching from where you are to where you want to go.

THE term “generation gap” is applied to situations where there is miscommunication arising from different contexts or points of view between generations, say a baby boomer and a millennial, analog versus digital, old versus young, and very old versus very young.

A sure way to bring down prices in any market is to replace monopoly with open competition. And if that market supplies a good that almost everyone relies on, then the cascading impact of lower prices will surely pull the inflation rate down.