If you ask agricultural economists what’s wrong with Philippine agriculture, they will cite the following causes: a.) overconcentration of the agriculture budget toward a low-value commodity, rice; b.) failure to integrate with international supply chains and to enjoy the benefits of international trade, again due to protectionism and obsession with self-sufficiency in all agricultural commodities; c.) a meagre agricultural budget; d.) lack of public goods, from farm to market roads to research and development, in the agricultural sector; and, e.) historical policy bias against agriculture, from overvalued exchange rates to protectionism for strategic industries, such as shipping and ports, which raises the cost of transporting rural produce to the market.

The middle class, that struggling segment of society that straddles between the rich and the poor, may soon be a thing of the past. And perhaps, even their schools. Despite stories of economic growth, the fact remains that the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening, leaving fewer and fewer people in between. As a consequence, services that cater to this segment may eventually fade away as well.

PRINCE Abdulaziz bin Salman has had enough. The Saudi Energy Minister, object of vitriolic criticism in Washington since he led the OPEC+ cartel into an oil output cut this month, said he keeps hearing: “Are you with us, or against us?” But the kingdom isn’t choosing sides, he told Wall Street’s good and great last week in Riyadh. “Is there any room for ‘We are for Saudi Arabia and for the people of Saudi Arabia?’”

In most democratic societies, midterm elections are seen not only as a referendum on the performance of a sitting government/political party. It may also determine to what extent can the current administration move forward unencumbered with its agenda -- or whether it will need to begin building bipartisan confidence in order to govern with its symbolic authority intact.

In the Philippines, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) has adopted an outcomes-based education approach with the primary goal of developing key competencies among...

The collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan on Aug. 15 sent a shock wave throughout the world.

THERE are many titles and versions of this fable and the author also is unknown. Inspired by the paradigms of Appreciative Inquiry, a research and a process facilitation method, let’s call this version of the story as, “Our Words Influence Our Worlds.”

On the outskirts of Grapevine, Texas, a town about five miles northwest of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, there’s a memorial dedicated to the 33 airline flight crew members who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. When I stumbled upon the monument several years ago with my family, I experienced contrary emotions: sadness inspired by the memorial’s stark figures, mixed with anger over how the attacks quickly became a pretext for US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

ONE of Jimmy Carter’s top aides was banned from talking about recessions or depressions. So the person in charge of the campaign against US inflation in the late 1970s came to describing downturns as “bananas.” Bendy food is again fashionable in economic parlance.

Constructing life stories is an extremely useful technique in investigating messy and often unintelligible social phenomena for which information is typically fragmented, uneven, piecemeal,...

IT’S TRUE that fans do not buy tickets for a ballgame to watch those on the side like the coaching staff, the referees, and...

The rise of condominium developments across the Philippines has inevitably given rise to a plethora of issues and disputes between buyers and developers. To...