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Why are the Philippines still a very poor country despite being under Duterte, and the poorest in Southeast Asia?
Jun Dalisay
Jun Dalisay, Has gone through Smith's works word by word, like a Bible
Answered 13h ago
The Philippines is poor because of uncontrolled population growth.
A country’s wealth is the quantity and quality of goods and services that it can produce. Before a citizen can produce something of value, he has to be educated and be trained to work hard to increase the quantity and quality of his work. A baby human takes 18 years before it is usually legally allowed to produce goods and services (get a job). In those 18 years, that human is a liability that takes in more resources than it gives, instead of being an asset that gives more than it takes.
A well-educated, employed adult human can pay back the expenses of raising himself, as well as have excess revenue to pay for the human that will replace it (i.e. its child). A highly-educated, hardworking human will earn much more revenue from age 18 to 65 (47 years), allowing him to produce and raise more replacements that have the same qualities as himself (i.e. have many good children). After many generations, this naturally leads to advanced societies such as the UK, Japan, and Germany.
However, the problem usually begins when:
Education is neglected or reversed. In this case, the quantity and quality of work by the citizens decline, causing a subsequent decline in revenue. This is seen best in comparing North Korea vs South Korea and in most Communist countries.
The population grows too fast. Having too many children will drain resources quickly especially if it is a continuous phenomenon. The country’s education services will not be able to train each child, leaving the ‘excess’ population uneducated, doomed to lower class work causing an oversupply which naturally force the excess population overseas, as observed by Adam Smith:
Wages cannot be very high in a country that has long been stationary. If the people’s revenue continued to be the same for several centuries, the supply of workers could easily surpass the demand for workers the following year. There would be no competition among employers for labour. The workers would increase in number and eventually find a shortage of employment. They would compete with each other to get employed and would lower wages to the lowest possible rate. The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China is worse than any European nation. In Canton, many thousand families live in little fishing boats. They are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage from any European ship, eating any dead animal as wholesome food. (Wealth of Nations, Book 1)
A common trait of rich countries is a low population growth rate. They usually just hire educated workers from overseas for mid level jobs so that their society does not have to be burdened with the 18-year liability and instead just get useful assets that already produce good value. Why build your own machine when you can just buy it?
Ideally, the money sent back by one overseas worker should be able to fund the education of one or two children back home. However, Filipino families usually have four or more children, so it is still not enough.
Thailand saw this problem in the ‘70s so it successfully ran programs that limited population growth. Notice how the Philippines and Thailand had similar populations in the 70s but started to split in the 80s.
Notice also that Thailand’s GDP also broke away from the Philippines in the 80’s
We all know that the Catholic Church is the organization that is promoting the overpopulation. Businessmen adapt to this policy by funding politicians that are popular, but have no morals, manifesting as systemic corruption.
The Philippine’s national hero Jose Rizal was very much against the Church and it is sad that has the Church has succeeded in keeping the country poor and ignorant just as it had done during Rizal’s time. The Church still has its hands very much on Philippine politics and the recent halting of the Reproductive Health bill is a good example.
Poor because of uncontrolled population growth? Chat