Figuring it out

IT used to be that turmoil in the global economy made little difference to the Philippines. Indeed, the so-called Asian financial crisis in the mid-1990s was hardly felt here. Not that we were doing so well then. In fact, it has been the opposite: we have been doing so bad for so long that the question has usually been, “How much lower can our economy go?”

That, however, is no longer true — or so says the government, which has been insisting for the last several months that the economy is on an upswing. And that is also the message Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has been spreading at the ongoing World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But now a U.S. recession is in the offing, and assuming that Malacañang has been right all along, a wince may not be all that we will be hearing in this country.

In the latest piece in i Report‘s Mad Over Money series, former socioeconomic planning secretary Dr. Cielito F. Habito examines some of the data on which the government has based its claim about our economy being, to use the president’s own description, “robust.” He also discusses the impact of what is happening globally on our own little corner of the world.

Read on at pcij.org to find out if our economy is really recovering or if it’s “nothing more than feelings.”