BoholAnalysis

  I spoke with a friend of mine a few days back, and he told me he is now ready to implement his backup plan – which is to migrate to another country to study a new field and leave all his tourism-related businesses behind.   He told me he did not see it coming. Like with all the others in his sector, he thought that COVID19 is a temporary anomaly and won’t stay for long.     But now, all his businesses are closed, and his cash reserve is bleeding. Despite the many times that the Provincial Government of Bohol announces re-opening with ribbon-cutting events here and there, tourists did not come by truckloads.   They came like summer rain – very few and far in between.     The province’s economic recovery plan is ill-advised and short-sighted.   We all know we relied primarily on tourism to fuel the local economy despite the fact that the sector is the most affected by the pandemic and will continue to be so in at least...

  When the whole province of Bohol was under enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in March 2020,  all business establishments were ordered closed except public markets, slaughterhouses, supermarkets and grocery stores, hospitals and health facilities, pharmacies and drug stores, and other essential businesses.  When the province transitioned to general community quarantine, some two months later, restaurants, service establishments, and other businesses as bookstores, accounting and legal offices, publishing and printing, are allowed to open but at 50% capacity. Throughout this period, the island province was closed to tourists and ports of entry were closed to incoming travelers, except for locally-stranded individuals and returning OFWs.  With these restrictions, it is unavoidable that businesses will have significant losses in revenues. Based on our study on the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 on Tagbilaran City, the service sector reported the worst decline in...

The COVID 19 pandemic has significantly changed the way we live.   For more than two months now, most of us, by force of governmental regulation, have stayed at home, avoided public and even social gatherings, set aside various recreation activities, and abstained from going to religious services.   These new  patterns of behaviour, regardless of the involuntariness of its nature , have altered not only how we think and do things; they also significantly altered the way we produce and consume things.   Businesses are severely affected by this pandemic.   Mall sales had gone down, not only because they were closed for a while, but also because many people can no longer go there, including children and the elderly, (and those without quarantine passes) even when lockdown rules were relaxed. When religious celebrations were halted, sales for flowers and candles went low.   When borders were locked, revenues of car rental companies, tour guides, and tourism-r...

With the bad things that happened with government service delivery these days – from tanim-bala to market fires due to bad cables – it is easy to be swayed to the opinion that this government can never do right, and that everything in the Philippine government, whether local or national, are all wrong.  If facebook posts and tweets are measures of the opinion of the “connected” Filipino nation (which, by the way, comprises only around 40% of the total population), it  seems that the general sentiment is that this country is so badly-governed that entertainment is a happy escape from the current mess we are in.  But often we forget that there are also many good things going on in this country’s government.  I do not want to be an apologist of the government but I want to speak of two experiences where I can say that as a citizen, I have benefitted from government’s willingness to protect the interest of its citizens and from government’s responsiveness to an ...

For the last half of 2012, I was desperate to find a decent bank willing to lend me money to finish my house at an interest rate that I can afford.   My wife, another Certified Public Accountant in the house besides myself, went through an options analysis including the Home Development Mutual Fund (HDMF) and a few commercial banks that promise interest holidays, or low interest rates, or fast processing and so on and so forth.   She found out that when one borrows from HDMF at an amount beyond Php750,000, the interest rates converge with that of commercial banks so we decided to apply a housing loan from both PS Bank and Bank of Commerce .   The experience was not that pleasant.   Both banks were slow at responding to request for information and failed several times to get back to us as to the status of our applications.   PS Bank, for example, treats us as miserable clients, not worthy to be lent some money despite our positive and highly liquid cash p...

Since economic reforms started to be implemented in developing countries in the 1980s, there has been a vigorous debate over the nature of the changes brought by market liberalisation and de-regulation, and over their results. As the debates over ‘getting the prices right’ and ‘appropriate incentives’ subsided by the early 1990s, the discussion moved towards, on one hand, the discussion of the role of globalisation in economic restructuring, and, on the other hand, of issues of institution building and good governance. Generally, the literature has focused on issues either at the international, regional, national or sectoral levels. While these debates have generated key insights, relatively little has been said on commodity-specific dynamics of change and on the possibilities (and the limitations) of economic upgrading for developing countries offered by specific markets. In local economies as Bohol, while there were a lot of discussions and interventions in the sphere of agr...