MANILA, Philippines – The European Union (EU) has warned that if the Philippines continues to drag its feet on a possible Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the EU might not be able to accommodate the Philippines anymore because it is processing several agreements with other Asian countries.

MANILA, Philippines – Officials lamented that the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) allocated only P38.8 million to the 2011 budget of the Climate Change Commission (CCC).

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippine Senate will continue to hear important legislative measures including the Reproductive Health (RH) bill during its two-and-a-half week break that began on Thursday.

MANILA, Philippines – Malacañang is renewing its pitch for a P21-billion program to benefit the “poorest of the poor,” appealing to Congress to keep the funds intact.

When the 21 leaders of APEC economies – including President Barack Obama, President Hu Jin-Tao, and our own President Aquino – meet next month in Yokohama, it will be the 18th time that APEC heads will do so. I have been privileged to attend all the APEC Summits beginning with the first one in Blake…

Judgment at 100 days is another one of those strange things picked up from the Americans. I’m not sure how you can fairly judge someone’s performance a scant three months into office. Six months is the more normal corporate measure. But 100 days is “mandated” by tradition, and President Aquino measured himself and his performance…

AKBAYAN, a party-list group allied with President Benigno Aquino III, was granted a P4.05-billion fund for its marginalized constituents in agrarian reform communities Thursday, lawmakers said.

THE country must relax its labor laws to attract foreign investment and remain globally competitive, Trade and Industry Secretary Gregory Domingo said Thursday on the sidelines of the Philippine Business Conference in Manila.

Credit cards are a necessary evil in the modern world. You need cards to book a flight, make reservations, pay bills, and to build credit. On the flip side, they can also devastate your credit rating if you are not careful.

Outsourcing services became an important sector in the world today. It has offered numerous solutions especially to big corporations who can not simply maintain in-house manpower. It enables the company to grow at a faster pace as it will be less constrained by large capital expenditures for people or equipment that may take years to…

MANILA, Philippines – The government must provide a predictable and secure business environment if it wants investors to commit billions of dollars to its planned infrastructure projects, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said.

The 17th ASEAN Summit, to be held in Hanoi in late October, will be a landmark event looking towards an ASEAN Community by 2015, a Vietnamese official has said.

Dividing a P21.9-billion lump sum into morsels and deciding how much goes where is not difficult. In denying the globally proven economic benefits of the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s (DSWD) conditional cash-transfer (CCT) program, critics assert funds might better be spent elsewhere. As they enumerate a motherhood wish list, they’ve forgotten the operant…

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is convinced that loose-credit standards rather than the absence of a credit-rating agency are the driving force behind the high incidence of loan defaults among credit-card borrowers.

Wealthy countries are buying up farm land in poorer countries – with global consequences. These controversial land grabs hurt local workers and ecosystems, and dangerously tip the scale of the world’s food economy.

THE OTHER week, we looked at why the State finds it hard to regulate smoking (because each man is free to imperil his own health), and how the State can overcome that liberty argument (because we are not free to poison others with second-hand smoke and because the public bears the invisible costs of tobacco-related…

THIS IS a continuation of my column last Wednesday on the P21-billion Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program: The CCT program is a non-productive endeavor and therefore a waste of money. It is like pouring money into a drain. When the money is exhausted, the beneficiaries would still be poor and not a single peso worth…

THE PHILIPPINES has slipped in terms of providing a strong justice system and addressing corruption, according to a new global index upholding the rule of law.

The globalization of economic activity and the accelerating international division of work, has lead to the dumping of hazardous and less profitable industries from industrialized or emerging industrial countries onto unprotected and vulnerable regions in less developed countries. Typical of such industries is shipbuilding. Four years ago, a Japanese shipbuilding company, Tsuneishi Heavy Industries Inc.,…

NEW YORK — Few bosses need worry that their employees want their jobs as most workers are just happy to be employed and one-fifth would even have a fling with their boss if it helped their career, according to a US survey.

THE EUROPEAN Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (ECCP) is calling for a law that will provide both incentives and penalties to promote energy conservation.

SINGAPORE — Advertising spending in the Philippines and in 11 other key Asia-Pacific markets rose strongly in the first half as economies emerged from recession, research firm Nielsen said on Thursday.

THE PHILIPPINES ranked in the middle of the pack of Asia-Pacific countries in terms of having the healthiest rivers, imperilling the country’s economic prospects, according to a draft study the Asian Development Bank (ADB) released yesterday.

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

SINGAPORE — Asia will end this year with strong growth, but a faltering recovery in the United States and Europe will hurt export-oriented Asian economies more than domestically focused ones in 2011, a Reuters quarterly poll shows.

COMPANY OWNERS and executives have become even more optimistic of business prospects, anticipating sales and profits to go up in the last quarter of the year against a backdrop of expanding economic output, export growth, low inflation, and bullish financial markets.

WASHINGTON (AP) – More people applied for unemployment benefits last week, the first rise in three weeks and evidence that companies are reluctant to hire in a slow economy.

Davao City, Philippines (15 October) — Advocacy groups have raised alarm on the increasing cases of HIV positive in the country, along with the climbing number of “Men who have sex with Men” (MSM) and transgenders (TG) as the current most-at-risk-population.

When politi-cians of significant stature such as senators express their opinion on certain issues especially in the form of a privilege speech, it is expected that such opinion whether for or against must help weld a better option for any instrumentality of the government to pursue.

AFTER Malacañang’s grant of amnesty to rebel soldiers linked to past military uprisings, the Catholic Church is now asking President Benigno Aquino 3rd to give similar attention to “common prisoners” languishing in jail. An official of the Episcopal Commission on Prison Pastoral Care (ECPPC) of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) on Thursday…