‘Dilawan economics’: Poverty of policy discourse
Back to the Stone Age!” That’s how United States President Donald Trump and his impresarios framed their next phase of escalation, threatening Iran with civilizational annihilation. In response, Tehran has warned of further globally cataclysmic disruptions should Washington target its core civilian infrastructure. These are not vacuous exchanges of threats. A month into the latest Persian Gulf War, thousands of Iranian civilians, including hundreds of school children, have been killed. Many more have been injured. Tens of thousands of civilian residents, as well as countless other cultural and health-care sites, have been damaged.
Air strikes reportedly hit a gas field, oil depots, and a major water reservoir; top technical universities, among the best in Asia; a half-a-billion-dollar iconic bridge, the most technically sophisticated in West Asia; and Iran’s main steel factories, some of the biggest in the world. Even cutting-edge research centers with an existential public health-care footprint—the century-old Pasteur Institute of Iran, responsible for developing numerous vaccines, and Tofigh Daru Research and Engineering Company, responsible for producing complex medicines that are difficult to import due to collective Western sanctions—were among the victims of this war.
Retaliatory attacks have targeted chemical and industrial sites not only in Israel, but also multibillion-dollar energy and transportation infrastructure, and reportedly even data centers across the Persian Gulf. Each side has sought to justify the ongoing “infrastructure war” as a legitimate military operation, raising alarm bells over the enduring impact on the lives of tens of millions of civilians across the Middle East. According to the United Nations Development Programme, the cost of the war could reach $200 billion, forcing millions of civilians, especially in Iran, into dire poverty.
Meanwhile, tens of millions of people across the Global South are struggling to sustain their daily lives amid an explosion in prices of basic goods, from diesel to fertilizers. By this time, it must have been clear to everyone that we have entered a “no-rules” world disorder, where every nation is basically left to fend for itself. Against this backdrop, the Marcos Jr. administration adopted a “Philippine First” foreign policy by, inter alia, negotiating energy deals with Tehran and Moscow as well as expressing openness to discussing joint exploration agreements in the West Philippine Sea with Beijing. In response, mainstream liberals and “MAGA Pinoys”—who neither criticized Trump tariffs on Manila nor the devastating global impact of the current ill-advised war—quickly lambasted the Philippine government but failed to provide any sensible alternative for tens of millions of suffering Filipinos.
Sadly, even our economic discourse suffers from the same level of puerile posturing and intellectual vacuity. The Philippines was placed in the “Lower Exposure, Strong Buffers” quadrant in a major recent emerging markets study—well ahead of Thailand, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Vietnam, Kenya, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia. Yet, the country has suffered the second-highest petrol-pump price increase (slightly behind war-torn Myanmar) in the world, according to The Economist.
Clearly, something is shady in our energy markets, where prices are quick to increase but stubborn to roll back; where panicky spot markets shape the price of precrisis stockpile; and where all the costs and risks are automatically passed down to consumers without optimal transparency about the private sector’s price-determination mechanisms.
Yet hardly a single major local economist has raised alarm bells over how decades of energy deregulation have not only enabled massive profiteering, but also “state capture” in the Philippines, namely how “individuals in government or corporations actively shape laws and institutions to serve their own interests.” Instead, some of the more outspoken local economists have been busy lambasting proposals for price caps and tax exemptions, as if their deracinated free market-based models are remotely relevant in a visibly oligarchic economic system.
In every major capital in the world, from Tokyo to Paris, I have met countless senior economists and policy specialists who rightly talk about the role of industrial policy, state regulation, and bureaucratic capacity-building in an increasingly deglobalized world. Yet, I have hardly heard anything along those lines from our liberal-minded local economists, who regurgitate outdated paradigms and “good governance” talking points, but have never bothered to seriously engage comparative development studies and works of world-class political economists—most notably our own Walden Bello, who has regularly debated with top global experts in top-tier universities on Earth. We clearly need to fight corruption. But unless we transcend intellectual parochialism and embrace interdisciplinary public policy debates, our country will still remain haplessly vulnerable and hopelessly unprepared in a new world disorder.
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richard.heydarian@inquirer.net
