This Sankey diagram depicts data from Ayala Corporation’s 2015 Annual Report: cash flows, both into and out of the company, from and to investing, operating, and financial activities, and total assets. Urban land and infrastructure activities emphasized.
This material originally appeared as a chapter in W. Bello and J. Chavez (eds.) State of Fragmentation: The Philippines in Transition. Bangkok: Focus on the Global South.
This entry is the first in a four-part serialization.
Part II: The new rules of the game
Part III: Back to the land
Part IV: The city and the restoration of class power
The past decade had been incredibly good for Filipino capitalism. In 2000, the combined profit of the thirty companies comprising the PSE composite index stood at PHP 26.1 billion. By 2010, it grew to 304.23 billion, or an increase of 635 percent in real terms. Within the same ten years, the Philippines’s gross domestic product grew by only 59 percent (see Table 1). In 2006, when Forbes began publishing an annual list of the richest Filipinos, the combined net worth of the forty wealthiest Filipinos was US$16 billion. By 2010, their fortunes were collectively worth 22.8 billion dollars, an increase of 32.3 percent in real terms. In comparison, GDP per capita increased by a mere 13 percent within the same period.[1] Far from depending exclusively on the Philippine market, several of their conglomerates are presently embarking on ambitious foreign expansion plans. Henry Sy’s SM Prime is presently planning to open five more malls in China within the next three years;[2] the Gokongweis’ Universal Robina is eyeing a factory in Burma, which would follow successful investments into manufacturing in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China;[3] and San Miguel Corporation, as part of its plan to bring total sales to one trillion pesos by 2013, is planning to put up plants in Burma, Cambodia, and Laos.[4]
This was by no means an expected outcome. The 2000s was a very turbulent decade for business: it began with Philippine capitalism in serious crisis, with the economy still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997-8. The initial contraction, at half a percent, was mild compared to the severe drops seen in the rest of middle-income Southeast Asia. But an anemic recovery, coupled with a hollowed-out neoliberal state unwilling and unable to either stem the outward flow of portfolio investments or to spend its way out of the crisis, prolonged the economy’s stay in the doldrums, culminating in a fiscal crisis in 2005. For much of the decade, the country was also in the grips of a political crisis. The impeachment trial of Joseph Estrada, the subsequent revolt of middle Manila, and the installation of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001 proved to be only the beginning: as the decade wore on, Arroyo’s questionable mandate increasingly became illegitimate, and would echo throughout the decade as a rigged election, mass mobilizations, and the reanimation of an adventurist, impune military. Finally, its closing years saw the global capitalism erupt in a systemic crisis that it has yet to emerge from.
Continue reading “Urban Property Development and the Creative Destruction of Filipino Capitalism”
This material originally appeared as a chapter in W. Bello and J. Chavez (eds.) State of Fragmentation: The Philippines in Transition. Bangkok: Focus on the Global South.
This entry is the second of a four-part serialization.
Part I
Part III: Back to the land
Part IV: The creative destruction of Filipino capitalists
From the early 1980s to the present, the structure of the Philippine economy, its position astride global circuits of labor, commodities, and capital, and the opportunities for accumulation available to its capitalist classes have been defined by three sets of processes. First among these was neoliberalization. At first glance, the Philippines was perhaps one of the countries where neoliberalism saw an unqualified ideological triumph. It was among the first countries in the world to participate in structural adjustment program in 1980, and has since been the recipient of a total of nine structural adjustment loans from the World Bank and a participant in three IMF programs.[1] The momentum of neoliberal reform has been sustained from within by state economic planning agencies, the academe, and private-sector think tanks.[2] As a consequence, the Philippines has consistently gone above and beyond the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus: it had unilaterally adopted among the lowest average tariff rates in the world, innovated the privatization of economic zones, and embarked on some of the biggest privatizations in the world.
Far from being a completely ideological project, however, neoliberalization in the Philippines has been implemented in a specific, locally-contingent, and highly-uneven manner, and the resultant contours were crucial to the recent successes of domestic capitalists. This is perhaps most evident in the Philippine privatization program. Beyond the crown jewel corporations, such as Philippine Airlines, Petron, National Steel, and Napocor, public land and infrastructure have been the most consistent targets for privatization by successive post-EDSA governments. In Manila, the privatization of military-owned land, such as Fort Bonifacio and Camp Bago Bantay, of national government centers in Quezon City, and of reclaimed land on Manila Bay have in recent years been a defining feature of urban development in the city. Through the Bases Conversion and Development Authority alone, a total of 267 hectares in the city have been privatized in this manner, creating some PhP46.697 billion in revenues.[3]
Two particular features of the privatization program deserve closer scrutiny. Continue reading “The new rules of the game”
This material originally appeared as a chapter in W. Bello and J. Chavez (eds.) State of Fragmentation: The Philippines in Transition. Bangkok: Focus on the Global South.
This entry is the last of a four-part serialization.
Part I
Part II: The new rules of the game
Part III: Back to the land
All told, the new Philippine economy saw billions of dollars churned into the land by overseas Filipinos and foreign investors, land that had been newly liberated from the state, agriculture, and domestic manufacturing, and redeveloped into subdivisions, condominiums, office space, and malls. This picture so far provides an account for what the new economy is, and why, how, and where these changes are taking place; what is so far lacking is an account of who benefited from this new economy.
As in any other economy, power in the brave new Philippines lies in the opportunities available for capitalist accumulation. Just like ownership of land under hacienda agriculture or dictatorial largesse under import-substitution industrialization, control over these opportunities will mean control over the creation of wealth.
The new economy saw, on one hand, the possibility of amassing wealth from haciendas or from small factories propped up by the state has been decisively closed off, even as important sunshine industries such as electronics manufacturing and business process outsourcing have daunting technical and financial entry barriers. On the other hand, the torrent of foreign investment and remittances that it has unleashed are creating immense opportunities in sectors which, whether by accident or design, are reserved for Filipinos.
Real estate development is one of these sectors. Over the past two decades, an array of crony capitalists, manufacturing-oriented taipans, and landed elites have converged on urban real estate as a central component of their strategies to diversify from their traditional sources of wealth. Continue reading “The city and the restoration of class power”
Kenneth Cardenas 