President Aquino’s term is still winding down; but offhand I’d say he could have easily done worse. Despite the pork-barrel horrors in the Senate, exemplified by the Napoles scams, no scandal has ever been attached to his office. He has kept up the growth of the formal economy that began, off and on, in the 1990s; he has apparently even raised our country’s global competitiveness to a modest degree.

Amid the continuing dysfunction of the political departments, his technocrats have kept the finance and foreign-trade ministries running professionally. The experts agree the economy’s short-term outlook is good, though its basic problems persist.

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