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The Cambodian people were traumatized by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in 1975-1979 that killed nearly a quarter of the country’s then 7.8 million population. Cambodian psychiatrist Dr. Sotheara Chhim knew that the mental condition afflicting a…
Give a family middle-class surroundings, and they begin to have middle-class dreams.” Gawad Kalinga founder Tony Meloto explained to me many years ago the rationale behind the colorfully painted houses that are the distinctive mark of their…
Last week brought welcome news on the economy, as the Philippine Statistics Authority reported that our gross domestic product (GDP) in the third quarter grew by 7.6 percent over the same quarter last year. Many argue that…
As the country began emerging from the worst of the pandemic earlier this year, I wrote of the need for us to go back to the basics in plotting our way forward. I was alluding to the…
I used to tell my students not to aspire to get a job after finishing their studies, but to aspire to create jobs. That is, aspire not to be employees but to be employers, as entrepreneurs. Could…
What’s wrong with our infrastructure? It’s all about the three attributes in our title: we don’t have enough, it’s not reliable, and costs too much. And these hold true whether it’s electric power, water, transport, telecoms, or…
With the peso-dollar exchange rate now seemingly courting P60 to the dollar, our economy appears to be suffering from a case of LDM, or loose dollar movement. Dollars are indeed flowing out of the country for various…
No doubt, agriculture now deserves top attention among the three economic sectors, over industry (mostly manufacturing) and services (with its mix of low- and high-value activities). The global food crisis that COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…
For someone like me who regularly pores over comparative data on our country relative to its Southeast Asian neighbors, it’s easy to feel hopeless and helpless about our country’s future, seeing us at the bottom in too…
So much has been written on the so-called “sugar mess” in the past two weeks that I hesitated to add more. But I thought it might help if we distilled the cold hard facts from opinions, accusations,…
The human costs of COVID-19 and how we managed it heightened grave threats to the nation’s future that had been looming even before the pandemic. We have a ticking time bomb in our midst that needs to…
The country lost one of its greatest presidents last Sunday. For me, Fidel Valdez Ramos (aka FVR) was the greatest, perhaps because I was privileged to witness and experience his exemplary leadership up close, as a member…
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