There are those who decry the idea of a new institution’s being subjected to a first-100-days analysis, saying that 100 days is a period insufficiently long to be conducive to a meaningful analytical outcome. I disagree.
I believe that in its first hundred days of existence a new institution can be meaningful on account of two things. First, it can, during that period, produce results sufficiently suggestive of a capacity for fulfilling the purpose of its establishment. And, second, it can set the tone for its operation for the time beyond the first 100 days. The second is probably more important than the first.
It bears pointing out, in analyzing the output and nature of an institution’s initial 100 days, that there is such a thing as a time lag or a reaction delay in this field of human endeavor. The Duterte administration’s economic managers have acknowledged that the administration that left office on June 30 left the Philippine economy in generally good shape, particularly in the economic-fundamentals area. Things did not just come to an abrupt end on that day, as water does when a tap is shut off. The good economic seeds planted by the Aquino administration have continued to bear fruit, in lagged fashion, during the weeks and months following Benigno Aquino III’s departure from Malacañang. There can be no better proof of this than the current spate of the EPAL-type billboards claiming credit for infrastructure and other projects started during Mr. Aquino’s watch.
This caveat having been laid down, it is possible to speak about the output and overall tone—the operating environment—of the present administration’s first 100 days in office.
First, the overall tone. True, the Duterte administration has put in place a 10-point economic agenda that is sound and comprehensive. But there the positiveness stops. The overall tone—finance people prefer to use the word ‘tenor’—of Duterte-administration economic management has been negative. Topping the list of negative moves has been the new administration’s attitude toward an entire, old-established industry—mining. Then there have been the high-decibel sirens-blaring assault on a practice that has provided hundreds of thousands of admittedly-less-than-ideal jobs in the nation’s largest retail and other service establishments, the move to place a moratorium on conversions of land from agricultural to commercial and other non-agricultural uses and, last but by no means least, the professed indifference to the cessation of external aid flows to this country from Western sources. And, of course, there has been the declaration of a desire to change the general orientation of Philippine external economic—trade, investments and resource transfers—from the US and the European Union to China and Russia. Chancelleries, boardrooms and stock exchanges do not exist in a vacuum: the negative impacts are beginning to make themselves felt.
As for first-100-days output, the total of significant projects completed or initiated is close to zero. This is because the new administration has been more busy talking—warning, threatening, sermonizing and investigating—than getting things done. Nothing much has been done about anything significant. The entire operating environment of the Philippine economy since June 29 has simply been too negative. All in all, a bad economic scorecard for the Duterte administration’s first 100 days.
Are things likely to change in the next 100 days and the 100-day periods after that? President Duterte keeps talking of “my country.” Better days had better be coming, this also is the country of the millions of Filipinos who voted for Grace Poe, Mar Roxas, Jejomar Binay and Miriam Defensor-Santiago.
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