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Crises Unraveling: 2009 Issues, Responses, Challenges and Hotspots |
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Aya Fabros
Shocks, swings and a historic global downturn took center stage in 2008, with the Philippines beset with one major crisis after another. Even before the global economic crisis hit the country, millions of Filipino families were already reeling from earlier shocks. A slew of programs and measures was put together in response, and the question being asked at this point: Is this enough to deal with the impact of what’s dubbed as the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression?
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Trade Roller-Coaster: The Ups and Downs in 2008 and the Road Ahead |
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By Joseph Purugganan
It was a dizzying roller coaster-year for trade.
In the year 2008, the Doha Round negotiations in the WTO teetered between breakthrough and breakdown. Over the course of countless green room meetings, ministerial conferences and four revisions of the draft texts that emerged last year, we witnessed several attempts to hammer out a new global trade deal despite the huge and widening gap between positions of Member countries on many critical issues.
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The migration imperative: Desperate times call for desperate measures? |
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By Julie de los Reyes
2008 clocked in a number of highs and lows in labor migration.
Amid the raging economic maelstrom globally, the year registered a record of $16.9 billion in total remittances, the highest since the government started monitoring remittances in 1989. Deployment figures broke past the one million mark by as early as September, sending more than 1.22 million OFWs to over 190 host countries this year.
With the remittances and deployment figures churning, the government’s optimism remained equally high throughout the year. The country’s strong macroeconomic fundamentals, it was said, have made the country more resilient to external volatility. The economy will continue register growth, no matter how modest, even while other economies are on the verge of collapse.
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By Walden Bello
Revised version of a talk given at the Forum on “Why is Obama Worried and Gloria Isn’t?,” PRRM, Quezon City, Jan. 13, 2009.)
We are into the four or fifth month of a very, very rapid unravelling of the global economy and financial institutions, and one very interesting phenomenon is that actual developments in the US and internationally have been much worse than the projections of the experts. From the decline in growth rate to the rise in unemployment rate, to the collapse of the financial sector, things have been consistently much worse than predicted.
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Between Coercion or Union: A Spectrum of Options regarding the Bangsamoro Question |
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By Herbert Docena
The year 2008 marked a turning point in the decades-long – some say, centuries-long – conflict in Mindanao. In August, the proposed Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) was catapulted into the national agenda, triggering the most heated public controversy regarding the Moro self-determination issue since the 1996 peace agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). A product of over ten years of arduous negotiations between the government and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) – which rejected the 1996 agreement, the MOA-AD deeply polarized the public: it revealed cleavages within the administration, the opposition, the church, and even the left and the peace movement. At the same time, it succeeded in unifying most Moros firmly behind it – and the landlords and local politicians in Mindanao firmly against it.
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