Thanks a lot for your inputs.

Nice to know that you are still with the Joint Congressional Joint Power Commission.

Joe

Thank you.

Joe

There will be a forum on precisely those topics, Revenues, expenditures, taxation and the leaks due to corruption. Am part of those organizing the forum and the invited moderators are Ciel Habito, Cayetano Paderanga and Winnie Monsod.

The unstated reality among these aspirants is that they would rather attend fora where motherhood statements are acceptable as platforms.

Dean

You may want to check with the economists who mentored Arroo in U.P. where she got her degree. Her grades explain a lot and may answer your question.

BTW, people were seeking employment abroad even before Arroyo took the reins.

It is simply convenient to blame her for the mess. What we would be fair to do is to blame her for aggravating it.

Dean

I agree. Bteer still, you may want to check as to when those debts were incurred and to which government agency the proceeds were applied.

When i last looked, more than 51% of debt service was due to borrowings incurred by the National Power Corporation either directly and thus within its balance sheet, or indirectly, piggy-backed on other Philippine bonds.

Dean

I don’t have the real estate numbers but I suspect that the Mindanao values, that region being affected by entirely different demographics, would not reflect the same in Luzon.

Dean

The equivalent in the Philippines is the Monetary Board. Macroeconomics is their province while it is the Department of Trade (Trade) and the Department of Finance (Finance) that tackle the microeconomic issues you state.

VAT is a revenue measure handled by Finace and its effects, as a consumer tax on all products and down the value chain are concerns of Trade.

The powers of the Monetary Board are confined to banking and financial institutions and regulating money supply (inflation, exchange rates, interest rates and printing money -those are the tools available to it)

The Angolan example shows that per capita gdp is not an accurate measure when used alone. Angola’s economy is based on the oil and diamond trade. GDP by itself does not show that the rvenues from those industries never reach the people.