Pangasinan Today

 By: Janice D. Hidalgo

 General Manager

For the second year in a row, a controversial annual survey by Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) has found the Philippines to be the most corrupt in

    It is important to keep the limits of the survey in mind. First, it does not include all countries in

   The survey is also a poll of polls: It is made up of the results of 13 different surveys, one for each economy. Only those expatriate businessmen who do business in the Philippines, for example, were asked for their perception of corruption in the

   Not least, and as PERC itself notes, corruption is the subject of greater media coverage in the Philippines than in authoritarian countries like China and

   And yet, despite all these necessary qualifiers, the stark reality confronts us. Seven years after the people-powered ouster of a plundering president, corruption in the country has grown worse.

  It is not only the PERC survey that reminds us; other surveys, such as those by the poll group Pulse Asia and an internal poll conducted by the influential Makati Business Club, reveal the unprecedented extent of the corruption. Indeed, the controversial Pulse Asia poll conducted last October, in the immediate aftermath of Pampanga province’s Gov. Ed Panlilio’s disclosure about the distribution of cash gifts right in Malacañang, showed that a plurality of voting-age Filipinos found President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to be the most corrupt of the country’s last five presidents.

  The civic value of the roiling controversy over the allegedly overpriced national broadband network (NBN) is that a threshold has been crossed: A people grown complacent over corruption allegations has rediscovered its sense of outrage. Even the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the

  We hope that, in recovering its sense of outrage, the public will rediscover—or learn to no longer ignore—the causal connection between corruption and poverty.

  Last week, the National Statistical Coordination Board released sobering statistical data: Poverty has claimed some 700,000 more families (well over 3 million people) in the three years between 2003 and 2006. Is it mere coincidence that some of the corruption scandals the Arroyo administration has to answer for occurred, or emerged, during the exact same period?

  Corruption leads to more poverty because money for development projects is diverted, because it keeps the disadvantaged in a continuing state of dependency and (not least) because it leads to more corruption. It is a self-perpetuating vicious cycle.

  Unfortunately, over the years, the public has learned to accept a minimum level of corruption—not only in the “tong” and “lagay” [bribe] that marks much of our daily existence, but also in nepotism (public officials hiring an unconscionable number of relatives as “confidential” assistants), in ghost projects or payrolls, in over-pricing. Even more unfortunately, over the years that minimum level has risen; today we face the possibility that a billion-peso project like the NBN could have been over-priced by as much as half.

  The Asian Development Bank’s latest diagnostic report cites five “constraints” holding back the country’s pro-growth and anti-poverty agenda. To be sure, the report belabors the obvious; we know all this all too well. But the reminders come at the right time. In particular, the report suggests that the country is losing the fight against corruption, thus dampening investor confidence.

  To turn the tide in this crucial fight, there is no substitute for putting more crooks in jail.