Well its now 2013, Christmas holidays extended or otherwise have been and gone, and it is back to the business of taking the Philippines forward—or at least all doing our little bit to try to bring that about.

Nationalism seems to be on the rise. National pride is fine, to be proud of the Philippines is I guess what most Filipinos want to be, and certainly the recent pronouncements on the growth of the economy are enough to make most Filipinos puff out their chests with a bit of national pride. Beware though the statistics do not tell the whole, and in reality there are quite some indications around that although fiscal performance may have improved a bit, the underlying economy in terms of jobs, exports, foreign investment and generally improved quality of life doesn’t quite tally.

The danger now is that people will become complacent as a result of all this bullish talk, they will think that there is nothing much for them to do to help improve the economy because it’s all been done by the finance people. For example, the country with the highest gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2012 is Mongolia (over 18 percent)—“how can that be, don’t they all live in ‘yurts’ or ‘gers’ and herd cattle and sheep on vast endless grasslands, and have a population of less than three million with a capital city with just over a million inhabitants?” Well yes, but they also have quite some mineral wealth, which the Chinese are helping the Mongols to exploit. No doubt the mining activities provide quite a lot of jobs for the locals. Their stunning GDP growth has been brought about by foreign activity on their soil—foreign investment improving the GDP of Mongolia, whether or not it is improving the lives of the Mongols, needs to be assessed by other measures.

The Mongolia case just demonstrates that there are always valid reasons behind the GDP growth figures, and those reasons may or may not reflect real national economic development. What is fundamentally important is that the money is used well and for the benefit of the citizens, and through that paving the way for sustainable economic development. Distributive justice, a matter much written about by the philosopher John Rawls.

A socially just allocation of goods and wealth is something that the Philippines more than most places seems to struggle with. GDP growth figures do not even pretend to reflect just distribution within society. In the Mongolian example, some people even government may be making lots of money from the Chinese mining activities, but I would guess that neither private enterprise nor government is using that money to install heating systems in the gers that many people live in.

The Philippines Stock Exchange was recently reported to be performing at record levels, well how does that affect the average tricycle driver?—not very much unless the gains from the trading are ploughed back into the economy in a way that is better for everybody—like education, social welfare and medical services, and most importantly the creation of enough real material jobs at decent salary levels.

The domestic private sector here, or anywhere else for that matter, will almost certainly not distribute its “winnings” in a just way. Perhaps that shouldn’t be expected anyway. The only valid distributor is government and through formal channels. Paternalistic distribution of government funds intended to improve the lot of ordinary citizens is not the best or the right way in which to do it.

GDP is an indicator of national wealth but is of little significance if that wealth is not used for the benefit of the real economy, i.e., that of the citizens through the establishment of an efficient, well controlled and governed economy that brings benefits to all. So the recent GDP growth figures are not to get too excited about or worse bring about any sort of complacency, there remains much to be done, so please help!

Mike can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.