PHL’s economic freedom improves

The Philippines’ ranking jumped nine spots in a global index on economic freedom due to higher scores in trade freedom and property rights, according to the Canada-based think tank Fraser Institute.

The country placed 59th out of 165 economies in the conservative think tank’s Economic Freedom of the World index which uses 2022 data. Its ranking improved from 68th place in the previous index which used 2021 data.

This was the Philippines’ highest placement since it ranked 57th in 2016.

The country received a score of 7.01 out of 10, a tad higher than the revised 6.93 in 2021. Its latest score was higher than the global average of 6.56.

Among Asia-Pacific jurisdictions, the Philippines lagged behind Hong Kong (8.58), Singapore (8.55), New Zealand (8.39), Australia (7.98), Japan (7.90), Taiwan (7.71), Malaysia (7.56), and South Korea (7.52).

However, the Philippines was ahead of Brunei Darussalam (6.99), Indonesia (6.96), Thailand (6.94), Mongolia (6.86), Cambodia (6.85), Vietnam (6.23), China (6.14), Papua New Guinea (6.02), Fiji (5.99), Laos (5.86), Timor-Leste (5.77), and Myanmar (4.54).

The Philippines had its highest score in the sound money category with 9.04, ranking 11th out of the 164 other countries. But it was down from 9.51 in 2021.

The country — yet again — performed worst in legal system and property rights with a score of 4.51, slightly higher than 2021’s 4.49.

The Philippine score in size of government declined to 7.83 from 7.91 in 2021. Among subcategories, it scored 8.83 in government investment and 6.91 in government consumption.

“The lesson from this is clear: a small fiscal size of government is insufficient to ensure prosperity,” Fraser Institute said. “The other areas of economic freedom — the rule of law and property rights, sound money, trade openness, and limited regulations — are also required.”

Manila’s score in the freedom to trade internationally category rose to 7.14 from 6.53 in 2021.

Its score in regulation slipped to 6.51 from 6.62 in 2021. Among sub-categories, the Philippines had its lowest score at 4.59 in business regulation and the highest score at 8.27 in credit market.

Leonardo A. Lanzona, an economics professor at the Ateneo de Manila University, said fiscal consolidation remains a key problem for the government’s economic policy.

It leads to “too much intervention in the markets,” he said in a Facebook Messenger chat.

Finance Secretary Ralph G. Recto in September said the Marcos government was on track with its medium-term fiscal consolidation program even as its debt remained at a record high due to pandemic-related loans.

“There is limited participation from the private sector as much of the economic growth is due to government spending,” Mr. Lanzona said. “Instead of the government spending directly, they should create the environment that allows greater public sector participation.”

Hong Kong topped the economic freedom index, followed by Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand, the United States, Denmark, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and Luxembourg.

At the bottom of the list was Venezuela, followed by Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria, Algeria, Myanmar, Argentina, Iran, Libya and Yemen.

The think tank said Ukraine (-0.94) and Moldova (-0.63) — the two nations that have either been invaded (Ukraine) or threatened militarily — saw the largest declines in ratings between 2021 and 2022.

The rating for Russia was also down (-0.30). “It may be obvious to point out, but war is very bad for economic freedom,” the think tank said.

Another important development in the index was the declining condition of Hong Kong, whose rating fell “precipitously” to 8.58 in 2022 from 9.05 in 2018.

“This is nearly half a standard deviation decline in just four years,” it said. “Thus, we continue to sound the alarm bell about signs of declining economic — and other — freedoms in Hong Kong.”

Sonny A. Africa, executive director of IBON Foundation, said the conservative index’s metrics “come from a narrow prioritization” of market freedoms and property rights, which “don’t align with a broader and more inclusive understanding of economic well-being and development.”

“This is why the so-called economic freedom scores are so inconsistent with the economic realities faced by the majority of Filipinos who remain poor and marginalized,” he said via Messenger chat.

Mr. Africa said the government’s fiscal consolidation was “evident in the distribution of the country’s declining score in size of government.”

“The relatively high score in government investment reflects the persistent emphasis on corporate-friendly infrastructure and pork barrel hard projects, while the lower government consumption reflects insufficient social services and safety nets,” he said.

“The increase in the score in the freedom to trade internationally category merely reflects continued liberalization that has worked so much against domestic agricultural and industrial development for decades,” he added.

Mr. Africa said the country’s nine-notch improvement in the index was “inconsistent” with important social indicators on a trajectory of decline.

The number of self-rated poor Filipino families has increased to 16.3 million or 59% of total families in September, while the number of households without savings rose to 19.2 million or 71% of total households in the third quarter, Mr. Africa explained, citing data from the Social Weather Stations and the central bank.

While the Philippines was ahead of Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar in the index, it has “much worse food insecurity than all these,” he said.

Mr. Africa cited a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report indicating that the Philippines has 44.1% of its total population suffering moderate or severe food insecurity, “which is more than the food insecurity of Indonesia (4.9%), Thailand (7.2%), Vietnam (10.8%), Laos (36.3%), and Myanmar (32%).”

“The Fraser Institute’s index focuses narrowly on market-oriented indicators such as trade freedom, property rights, and business regulation which are presumed to improve the economy,” Mr. Africa said. “In practice, these measures favor a deregulated economy that benefits large corporations and wealthy individuals at the expense of broader social development outcomes.”

In the report, the Fraser Institute noted that high-income industrial economies generally rank quite high for legal system and property rights, sound money, and freedom to trade internationally.

Their ratings were lower, however, for the size of government and regulation.

Source: Business World

The Philippines' business environment needs improvements

The Philippines' business improvement has scope for improvements based on the results of the World Bank's inaugural Business Ready (B-Ready) report.

The country's scores across the three pillars and 10 topics covered by the report ranged as high as the first, or top, quintile and as low as the fifth.

Overall, the B-Ready report assesses a country's "business environment by focusing on the regulatory framework and the provision of related public services directed at firms and markets, as well as the efficiency with which firms can comply with regulations and access public services," the World Bank said.

The 10 topics, meanwhile, "correspond to various stages of the life cycle of a firm and its participation in the market while opening, operating (or expanding) and closing (or reorganizing) a business."

Economies in the top quintile "demonstrate the highest performance," the World Bank said, while those in the second "have above-average scores ... but also show potential for improvements."

Third quintile members, meanwhile, "exhibit a mix of strengths and weaknesses," those in the fourth "grapple with a challenging business environment," and the bottom quintile comprise economies that "face significant challenges."

The Anti-Red Tape Authority (ARTA) said it welcomed the Philippines' "inclusion in the top 40 percent." The report, however, did not present an overall ranking of the 50 economies studied.

The World Bank instead divided countries into five equal groupings, or quintiles, based on their scores in terms of the three pillars and topics.

The Philippines posted its highest score of 70.68, in a scale of zero to 100, in the regulatory framework pillar, enough to put it in the second quintile or 16th out of the 50 economies.

It was in the middle of the pack, or the third quintile, in the public services pillar with a score of 50.80 for 24th.

The country was 36th in terms of operational efficiency, scoring 57.95, which placed it in the fourth quintile.

"Economies of varying income levels can adopt strong regulatory frameworks," the World Bank said, noting that while high-income countries dominated this pillar (Hungary was 1st), it also included a lower-middle-income economy such as the Philippines.

As for public services, "high-income economies tend to provide higher quality public services to support businesses, but all income levels are represented across top quintiles," it added.

Estonia topped this category.

With regard to the third pillar, where Singapore came first, "economies across all income levels can facilitate operational efficiency for firms."

By topic, meanwhile, the Philippines was in the first quintile (6th) in terms of labor, in the second with regard to international trade (17th); and in the bottom fifth in terms of business entry (42nd).

It was in the third quintile for the remaining seven topics: business location (30th), utility services (23rd), financial services (29th), taxation (22nd), dispute resolution (21st), market competition (28th) and business insolvency (29th).

The ARTA said that the Philippines' 16th place in the regulatory framework pillar underscored progress in improving the country's business environment.

This, it added, showed the government's success in "establishing clear and effective rules and regulations that support business operations from startup to closure."

As for the public services and operational showings, the ARTA said that it acknowledged the "need for further improvement."

With regard to the topic results, it said that the Philippines posted a "strong performance" in the areas of labor, international trade and utility services.

"It highlights significant advancements made in improving labor conditions, digitalizing trade processes and providing transparent utility services, it added.

The key areas for improvement, meanwhile, were said to be business entry, business location, market competition and business insolvency.

"ARTA is confident that the country's ranking will continue to improve with the full implementation of the government's efforts that are designed to enhance the delivery of government services," the Office of the President-attached agency said.

"We recognize the need for a whole-of-nation approach that underscores the significance of coordinated and harmonized alignment of relevant service delivery from the government to the stakeholders."

The B-Ready report, it also said, "may not yet fully capture the impact of the government's recent initiatives, [but] we are optimistic about the continued improvements in the country's business environment moving forward."

The World Bank said that the B-Ready report was still being refined in terms of process and methodology. Next year will see coverage expand to 112 economies, while the 2026 list will grow to 184.

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Source: Manila Times

Donia, London: Fantastic Filipino food in the most soul-sucking part of the city

If you’re going through Carnaby Street hell, just keep going. Adobo will be your reward

They’ve renamed Carnaby Street. We’re supposed to call it “Carnaby” now. My cab driver said they’d reclassified it as a “quarter” so they could charge Carnaby Street rents in the less glamorous Soho side roads. Not, by any means, the most paranoid theory he expressed. Well, whatever they’ve done with the place, I think we can all agree it’s awful. It’s like a ride in a Soviet theme park, designed to convey the vacuity and decadence of western youth. It can only apparently be appreciated in mobs of 40, clad in identical puffa jackets, sharing two vapes and a litre vat of bubble tea.

Granted all the space in this magazine, I could not express the vileness of Kingly Court, the “dining destination” at the quarter’s joyless heart. I once had a temporary job as a security guard in a mall in North Carolina. I used to sit in the deserted food court in the small hours, entirely alone, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. It was somehow a warmer and less soul-destroying place than Kingly Court. But the small clean room on the upper landing — light, bright and with whitewashed brick walls — is neutral and innocuous. Here is Donia, a small modern Filipino restaurant.

I’m not usually troubled by the acoustics of restaurants, but Donia’s are challenging. It’s a cruel and unusual battering with random fragments of unattenuated but enthusiastic food conversations. Probably what it’s like living inside Gregg Wallace’s head. I’d also like to express my undying enmity to the platoon of business bros at the next table whose knobs went all the way to 11 and were stuck on “transmit”. They obviously felt their squalid property transactions were “on a strictly need-to-know basis” but the bastards had decided we needed to know. There’s a special region of hell reserved for people like this. It’s basically them, me and an immersion blender for eternity.

The chicken offal skewer was easy to agree on and turned out to be half a dozen hearts on a stick with a dark, sticky sweet sauce. It was good, but I felt a little hard done by that they’d stayed entirely cardiac. I would gladly have extended at least into the hepatic or renal.

Adobo is regarded as a national dish of the Philippines — loved, celebrated and much debated. It’s a preparation of meat, poultry, fish or vegetables browned and then braised in vinegar and soy. The sour element is distinctive, unusual and stimulating. We Brits don’t use as much sour in our cooking as other cultures, and the effect on the palate can be every bit as transformative as the more familiar umami. Here, rather than a vast bowl of stew, they’ve made a smart little adobo of mushroom, which they’ve then used to make crisp fried croquetas. They were extraordinary, prompting me to reassess my life goals radically in favour of spending more time eating adobo.

We worry so much about eggs’ freshness here in the UK that we obsessively refrigerate them and panic when sell-by dates approach. The idea, therefore, of an egg brined for preservation is challenging to most of us. It calls to mind the pickled egg jar in the pub, only marginally less appetising than a pathology specimen. But we’re getting this catastrophically wrong. The Filipino way is to hard-boil and grate them on to a salad with chunks of fresh tomato. It looks like yellow snow, or what’s fashionably termed a “drift” of parmesan, but there’s no sulphurous egginess. There’s a very slight concentration of the yolk flavour and the salt picks it up further. Complex savouriness set off by a cool, crisp and neutral salad.

Kinilaw is a pickle of fresh fish in vinegar and citrus. In this case, the citrus is finger limes and the fish sea bream . . . but you guessed that. All fish in London at the moment seems to be sea bream. I’m not complaining, I just can’t work out if there can be any left in the sea. But all that fresh lightness was going to need a counterweight, and it came in the form of lechón.

Lechón is suckling pig, usually roasted whole with much effort spent over the crackling. The flesh is subtly flavoured and creamy, the skin a filigree matrix of gold, like the inside of a Crunchie bar. At Donia they serve just a piece, which by itself provoked moans of joy at the table, but it was as nothing beside The Astonishing Sauce. It was an extremely unprepossessing colour. What Farrow & Ball would probably call “Support Hose Beige” but it was made of puréed chicken livers, vinegar, soy and sugar. If you can imagine all the things you love about chicken liver parfait that elevate it beyond school-dinner liver. That. Poured over pig. This incarnation was also fired up with peppercorns. Shameless lily gilding that I can only endorse.

In the circumstances, it seemed just silly not to go the extra mile and order the fresh grilled half lobster, “ginataan”, humming with the scorched-shell redolence of a beach barbecue. It’s hard to do it justice. Imaging two alien xenomorphs wrestling naked in a drench of delicately fragranced coconut curry sauce. Lots of ferociously dangerous bits but strangely erotic.

The food at Donia was fantastic, new to me and a delightful revelation. Service was outstanding, and the wine list was smartly chosen to survive a firefight of new and unusual flavours.

If I could find a way, I’d like to be spirited into Donia, possibly through a back door and into the lift, wearing some kind of obscuring bag over my head so I didn’t register where I was. After that, all I’d need is a table away from the business bros and about a gallon of that lechón sauce.

Donia

2.14 Top Floor Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London W1B 5PW

Starters: £3.50-£20

Mains: £22-£82

Sweets: £4.50-£12

Source: Financial Times