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FEW would contest the economic contribution of the holiday shopping
rush. Consumer spending after all has been the main driver of
Philippine economic growth, fueled largely by the record remittances
of Filipinos working or living abroad.
But behind the yearly mad rush to the malls is
perhaps one of the most wasteful activity every urban habitue has
had to bear during this time of the year. We’re talking about the
hellish traffic caused by the mass congregation at the shopping
centers, which have mushroomed in and around Metro Manila and most
other urban centers outside the capital.
At times compared with the legendary snarls in
Bangkok, Philippine metropolitan road conditions are getting worse
ironically despite record high oil prices. We would expect that
costlier fuel would discourage the use of motor vehicles, as people
tap the slowly but surely growing network of rail transits
particularly in Metro Manila.
To be sure, many—including the car-owning
middle class—have taken to the three lines of the Light Rail
Transit (LRT), as can be gleaned from the jam packed trains
especially during the rush hours. Next to the shopping centers, the
LRT is becoming one of the few places where members of nearly every
socioeconomic class rub elbows with each other. There was a time
when a Cabinet secretary belonging to the country’s old rich rode
the LRT to get from his office at Makati and back home in Cubao.
In contrast to the wide patronage of the LRT, we
can see the declining clientele of public utility vehicles plying
the routes along which runs any of the three rail lines. The
one-million-peso question then is this: Why, despite commuters’
preference for the LRT, are we still suffering from traffic clogs
caused by otherwise empty public buses and jeepneys crawling, if not
literally parked along those train routes?
The obvious answer is the huge subsidy these
public vehicles enjoy courtesy of discounts on their diesel
purchases. Since the diesel discounts are granted indiscriminately,
even those operators whose public vehicles ply routes already served
by light trains enjoy what is nearly a free ride.
Consequently, other motorists plying those
routes have to bear the added cost of unnecessary traffic. These
costs—economists call them externalities—include liters of
gasoline wasted by cars caught up in traffic caused by empty public
buses and jeepneys that double-park, refuse to move, and wait for
who appears to be Godot.
Add to that the pollution caused by idle
vehicles contributing to the buildup of carbon dioxide and other
fumes harmful to human health and their environment. We may have
signed the Kyoto Protocol, but implementation appears to be spotty
in this regard.
Meanwhile, the car-owning members of the middle
class have to ditch their vehicles and take the LRT just so they can
save on their gasoline bills since they don’t enjoy the same fuel
discounts. No wonder then that economists are speculating on the
country’s dwindling middle class. The middle class may just as
well leave for greener pastures—literally and figuratively!
The government has its system of incentives
wrong. In the particular case of fuel discounts, it is extending
this privilege—and yes it is a privilege!—even to those
contributing to waste. That’s the problem if things can be had
cheap, which is the situation right now when the country is enjoying
a deluge of dollars, which not only is fueling consumer spending,
but also keeping our oil import costs down, thus the record low
inflation in spite of sky-rocketing crude prices in the world
market.
A Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas study showing that
even remittances of overseas Filipinos are just as volatile as
foreign investments should serve as a wake-up call. If economic
policies are biased against the middle-class, which includes a huge
number of overseas Filipinos, then the government should expect no
less from this influential group. After all, what goes around comes
around.
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