About the Book

Seven million Filipinos live or work abroad. One in five wants to emigrate. What has gone wrong in the 20 years since the popular ousting of President Marcos? In this analysis of the roots of failure, Walden Bello shows how the political system remains dominated by a competitive elite who oppose any significant attempts to address the country‘s huge social inequalities. He pinpoints the unravelling of land reform, the overwhelming power of private interests, the foreign debt service burden, WTO pressure to adopt free market policies, and how sustainable and environmentally friendly development has been consistently undermined by structural adjustment. The way out, he argues, is through the wholesale overhaul of the system of governance, leading to a new development strategy based on more, not less, state intervention, the domestic market as the driver of growth, and working together with other countries in the South.

Commendations

"Though the book may be too harsh in its judgement of some well-meaning economic managers of the country, it does argue convincingly that the market and the private sector need to be governed; and they cannot in any way substitute for bad governance and irresponsible government." - Joseph Lim, Bureau for Development Policy, UNDP and former Professor, UP School of Economics, Manila

"In shining their spotlight on the Philippines, Bello and his associates illuminate the quagmire of the elite democracy ushered in by ‘people power‘. And they do so with verve and insight. Globally renowned as a scholar and activist on globalization and peace, Bello is clearly one of today‘s great critical minds." - Robin Broad, Associate Professor, School of International Studies, American University, Washington DC.

"This book offers a powerful indictment of the neoliberal economic policies pursued in the Philippines since the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos. The authors make a straightforward but compelling argument: The main obstacle to broad-based development has not been too much state intervention in the economy, but rather too much inequality in the distribution of wealth and power." - James K.Boyce, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Contents

Introduction: Requiem for the EDSA System?
1. The Political Economy of Permanent Crisis
2. Agrarian Reform: The Promise and the Reality
3. The Neoliberal Revolution and the Asian Financial Crisis
4. Multilateral Punishment; The Philippines in the WTO, 1995-2003
5. The Panacea of Privatization
6. Unsustainable Development
7. Corruption and Poverty: Barking up the Wrong Tree?
Conclusion

About the Author

Walden Bello is the founding Director of Focus on the Global South, a policy research institute based in Bangkok, Thailand. Prior to that, he was Executive Director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) in Oakland, California. Educated at Princeton University where he did his doctorate in Sociology in 1975, he subsequently taught at the University of California, Berkeley where he was a research associate with the Center for South East Asian Studies. A renowned campaigner for international justice and development and one of the leading independent critics in the South of current global economic arrangements, he is the author of numerous books, including:

A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand (with Shea Cunningham
and Li Kheng Poh) (1999)
Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty (with Shea Cunningham)
(1994)
People and Power in the Pacific: The Struggle for the Post-Cold War Order (1992)
Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (with Stephanie Rosenfeld) (1991)
Brave New Third World? Strategies for Survival in the Global Economy (1990)
Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines (1982).