Abstract
When President Ramos declared a ‘National Day to Overcome Extreme Poverty’ in October 1993, the magnitude of the task confronting him was hard to gauge. Depending on the sources used (which include two different government estimates), the Philippines has 40.7 per cent, 50 per cent, 59 per cent or 70 per cent of its population living in poverty, and 21 per cent in ‘absolute poverty’.1 Ramos’ own Philippines 2000! programme puts the figure at 50 per cent and specifies a characteristically optimistic target of 30 per cent by 1998. The Philippines cannot hope to meet this target except by fiddling the figures and adopting criteria for poverty closer to the World Bank’s standards for ‘absolute poverty’. The only consolation is that the percentage of people in poverty is not rising steeply, as it did during the later Marcos years, which saw an emphatic reversal in poverty reduction. In 1972 49 per cent of families were in poverty; by 1985 the proportion had increased to 59 per cent.2
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Notes and References
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Chandra Muzaffar, Challenges and Choices in Malaysian Politics and Society (Penang: Aliran, 1989) p. 247.
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M. Hiebert, ‘Wage Revolution’.
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See L. Jellinek, The Wheel of Fortune (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991). Similar processes are documented in South Korea (Hart-Landsberg, p. 261), the Klang Valley in Malaysia and in Shanghai to accommodate the Pudong development (FEER, 18 June 1992 ).
J. Wintle, Romancing Vietnam ( London: Penguin Books, 1992 ) p. 240.
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K. Rafferty, City on the Rocks: Hong Kong’s Uncertain Future (London: Penguin Books, 1991) p. 81. The Hong Kong government began building flats in large numbers in 1954 and was building 40 000 a year by the late 1980s.
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S. Kamaluddin, ‘Lender With a Mission’ FEER (18 March 1993) p. 38. The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee has also been active in lending small sums to 450 000 women (Financial Times Survey, ‘Bangladesh’, 9 May 1994 ).
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Malaysian figures from Rigg and Stott in Chapman and Baker (eds), p. 91. Thailand from interview, Dr.Scott Christensen, Thailand Development Research Institute, February 1994.
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G. Chapman, ‘The South Asian Core’ in Chapman and Baker (eds), pp. 2128.
Bae Sun-Kwang and James Cotton, ‘Regionalism in Electoral Politics’ in J. Cotton (ed.), p. 184. The verdict on efforts at regional redistribution of activity in South Korea during the 1980s was largely negative: see C. M. Douglass, ‘Regional Inequality and regional policy in Thailand: An International Comparative Perspective’ (Thailand Development Research Institute Background report no. 3.3 1990 ) p. 34.
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A. Schwarz, ‘Looking Back at Rio’, FEER (28 October 1993) p. 48, quoting World Bank report.
G. Wehrfritz, ‘Living dangerously’, FEER (10 December 1992) p. 13.
H. McDonald, ‘Closing the Floodgates’, FEER (15 April 1993) p. 15.
H. McDonald, ‘Political Tremors’, FEER (14 October 1993) 18, citing India Today estimate.
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M. Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity ( London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1991 ) p. 257.
E. Wachs Book, ‘China’s Noveaux Riches Flock to Macau’, FEER (19 August 1993) p. 30.
A. Chan, ‘The Social Origins and Consequences of the Tiananmen Crisis’ in D. S. G. Goodman and G. Segal (eds), China in the Nineties: Crisis Management and Beyond ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 ).
C. Goldstein, ‘Well-Connected’, FEER (10 February 1994) p. 54.
L. Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: The Story of the Overseas Chinese (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1993) pp. 32–34, 35–36.
M. Vatikiotis, ‘Value Judgments’, FEER (10 February 1994) p. 28.
E. Paisley, ‘Cut the Fat’, FEER (9 December 1993) p. 62.
C. Goldstein, L. Kaye with A. Blass, ‘Get Off Our Backs’, FEER (15 July 1993 ) p. 68.
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© 1995 Graham Field
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Field, G. (1995). Dividing the Spoils. In: Economic Growth and Political Change in Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24189-7_4
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