Methinks the report aims, among other things, to silence the criticism Marcos Junior has received about his frequent travels.
However, it also has an unintended consequence: Why go through all the effort of changing the Constitution to remove the economic restrictions on FDI? All the country needs to get FDI is to send the President abroad, and voila!, we have all we want. So, shut up, ChaCha advocates.
But we still have to look at the numbers.
A colleague, Gerardo Sicat, asserts that the progress of “Tiger Economies” of East Asia-South Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong and Singapore – was “fueled by the heavy participation of foreign capital”. I refer him to the table on FDI, 1970-2021 which Sonny Africa presented to the Congressional Committee on Constitutional Amendments at the hearing on Thursday, where we were all present. the data show that FDI flows into Taiwan and South Korea were on the whole less, both in absolute terms and in percent of GDP, than FDI flows into the Philippines. In other words, there was no “heavy participation of foreign capital” that Gerry Sicat describes.