My article as printed in the Cebu daily News.

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From 2001 to 2008, the Philippines only had $12 billion in foreign direct investments, which is less than Vietnam’s $36 billion for the same period.

 I am not an economist. However, for the last 20 or so years, my passion has been in management and technology, and along the way, I have written over a thousand articles and talks on making management and technology more understandable to everyone.  Over the last few months, I have heard a lot of discussions about the economy, and I sincerely feel some of them were knocking on the wrong direction.  I would like to humbly present my own understanding and simplification, for those of you who may want to understand a little bit of what I believe is a very crucial point in our nation’s development.

 I might be oversimplifying certain things, but hopefully this analysis will give a better idea of what I believe we should focus on.

 GDP  and  GDP per capita.  

 GDP or Gross Domestic Product refers to all the goods and services produced within the nation in a given year.    This is one of the standard by which a nation’s economy is gauged vis a vis how it is performing against its neighbors. 

 For the periods from 1980 to 2009, the country’s GDP grew from 32 billion dollars to 158 billion dollars.  That’s five times!  On paper, that looks good.  But wait a minute!  It’s not good, because during that period of time, we also almost doubled our population, from 48 million to over 92 million in 2009.  That means that while output grew almost five times, there were twice as many people to share or output that, so at the end, per person, you are only about 2.5 times better off!

 If you glean the country’s per capita GDP, you will note that our GDP  (adjusted for purchasing power parity or PPP) actually grew from $1247 per capita in 1980 to $3437 in 2009.  That’s only about 2.7 times in almost 30 years. 

 That might seems impressive until you see what China has accomplished.  For the period of 1980 to 2009, China grew GDP from $309 billion to $4.757 trillion.  That’s a growth of about 15 times.  But it gets even better because in that period of time, their population grew from around 987 million to 1.334 billion.  That’s a growth of only 35% over 30 or so years. 

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