Wanted: Distributive justice

People nowadays expect the state to guarantee a measure of social equity—to help the needy and to prevent undue discrepancies of wealth. Social progress has come to be measured by the spread of distributive justice. And this a society achieves when no individual in it lacks the critical minimum of material means that the society as a whole accepts as fair and just.

Compared with its neighbors in the world’s fastest-growing region, our country has had a poor record in guaranteeing a measure of social equity. Until now, it lacks a system of distributive justice.

Together with hermetic Myanmar, eccentric North Korea, and then war-torn Indochina, the Philippines has been the exception to the “East Asian miracle”—the generation of extraordinarily high growth with income equity our neighbor-economies experienced, starting around 1965, that for the most part continues until now.

After opening its economy and taking up the market system in 1986, Vietnam itself has experienced almost two decades of rapid but equitable growth. And it has now been followed by Cambodia, whose growth strategy is based on its garment exports and its tourism complex of Angkor, the twelfth-century Khmer capital.

Benevolent authoritarians

Inequality typically rises during periods of break-neck growth. But in East Asia, under the regime of authoritarian states, ordinary people shared in growth’s proceeds from the very beginning. What compelled these non-accountable regimes to make so heavy investments in popular welfare?

The short answer is that they all desperately needed legitimacy. South Korea felt threatened by invasion from its communist northern half. Taiwan feared an attack from China, Thailand from communist Vietnam and Cambodia. Malaysia and Singapore both experienced ethnic conflicts; and in Indonesia General Suharto had just put down the military’s communist rivals.

By then, the Philippines had survived the Huk uprising, and would soon be facing another insurgency led by Maoist students. But for the most part our elite—hunkered down on the outskirts of the Asian mainland—continued to feel secure under its American umbrella.

Agrarian reform

In much of East Asia, land reform that both fostered social and political stability and raised agricultural production became the foundation of “shared growth.”

In Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, it was imposed by the Americans. In Thailand, it had been part of Chulalongkorn’s reforms (along with the emancipation of slaves) in the late 1800s.

Neither in Indonesia nor in Malaysia was land reform that urgent then. Java has never been characterized by extremely large holdings. Malaysia has an even more favorable land-population ratio.

In the Philippines, where land reform was crucial, it did not survive the opposition of vested interests—not even during 1986 to 1987, when the “people power” icon, Corazon Aquino, as president of a “revolutionary government,” possessed emergency powers.

In Malaysia, where income inequality had been the most extreme, government adopted stringent measures to bring up the politically dominant Malay majority to the level of the economically dominant Chinese minority. In 1971, it set up an affirmative action program to raise the bumiputra share of the economy to 30 percent over 20 years.

Everywhere in the region, everyday people saw their lives improving steadily because of more food, more jobs, higher wages, state support for small and medium-size industries, better infrastructure and increased social spending on health care, mass housing (80 percent of Singaporeans live in public housing) and, above all, basic public education.

Education above all

Of all the mechanisms for upward mobility, basic education has been the most effective because it breaks the cycle of inherited poverty that keeps down generation after generation. The overwhelming majority of Filipinos living in poverty today are the children of people who lived in poverty. And the key to breaking out of this culture of poverty is education, especially for women.

But we have unaccountably been skimping on our education spending. According to the World Bank,Thailand spends at least six times more, Singapore 13 times more and Japan 36 times more on every public-school pupil. As one result, 26 percent of all Filipinos have no formal schooling at all, or no more than an elementary education.

For education, Indonesia too spends little more than 2 percent of GDP (gross domestic product, the total value of goods and services produced in a country in a year). The optimum is 6 percent. But where we divert a great portion of our education budget to maintain state colleges and universities, Jakarta concentrates its public spending on primary education. The result is near-universal education at the earliest level that reflects on Indonesia’s agricultural production and rural development.

Through school feeding and nutrition programs, we must ensure that the young children of the very poor stay in school. (They drop out most frequently after completing Grade 1.) For older, potential dropouts, we should take up seriously the “wages-for-learning” programs practiced in Latin America.

Affirmative action

Because the poorest Filipinos cannot wait for growth to trickle down to them, government must also carry out time-bound “affirmative action” programs on behalf of the most disadvantaged regions, provinces and municipalities.

Our ethnic communities in the Cordilleras and in our Muslim South, as well as the Bicol Region, Eastern and Western Visayas, Northern Mindanao and parts of Northern Luzon deserve positive discrimination in their social services.

A measure of how disadvantaged our Muslim communities have been is that life expectancy in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao was 13 and a half years shorter than the national average in 1997—and it may have even deteriorated since then. –Juan T. Gatbonton, Manila Times