Word: aquinos
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...battered Philippines (pop. 56 million). After two years of dramatic slump, the country's $32 billion economy is expected to grow an impressive 6% to 7% this year. Inflation has fallen from 40% two years ago to about 1% or 2% today. Free-market-oriented economic reforms by the Aquino government have also laid the groundwork for future growth. Says Gordon Westly, vice president of Manila's American Chamber of Commerce: "We're on the slow road to recovery...
That is surely good news for Aquino, whose People Power revolution helped drive former Strongman Ferdinand Marcos from office just over one year ago. Since then she has been beset with a mild flurry of rightist plots aimed at either unseating her or destabilizing her government. An 18-year Communist insurgency stopped briefly but resumed with a vengeance last February. For the economy, the result was that the Philippine GNP, which had dropped 5.6% in 1984 and another 3.8% in 1985, continued to fall through the first half of 1986 before ticking up an almost unnoticeable...
Stark need and the Communist insurgency have given Aquino a severe challenge on two fronts: achieving both economic recovery and political stability. Economically, Aquino has fought back with, among other things, an adjustment program negotiated last October with the International Monetary Fund. The IMF promised to lend the Philippines roughly $330 million while insisting on limitations to monetary growth and fiscal restraint along with basic changes in the country's protectionist economy...
...Aquino's government has also instituted a version of Reaganomic tax reform. The top tax rate has been cut from 60% to 35%, while a broad range of special exemptions has been eliminated. In the same egalitarian vein, the country's sugar and coconut monopolies, long in the hands of Marcos cronies, have been disbanded. The world price paid for copra, or coconut meat, has increased 250% in the past year; thanks to trust busting, money that once went to monopolists now goes to farmers. In the effort to purge Marcos-style cronyism from the economy, scores of nonperforming public...
...sobering fact, though, is that the Philippine economy must continue to grow at the projected 6% rate for the next four years just to bring per capita income back to where it was in 1981. Along with that daunting prospect, the Aquino government faces the critical issue of land reform. The Philippine population is growing at 2.5% annually; many of the children are born into families of landless, impoverished peasants. They are a prime recruiting source for Communist rebels...