Is national progress a sport?
Why do pundits never tire of complaining, “There was a time, long ago, when we Filipinos were the best in such and such, but now our neighbors have already caught up with us!” It’s as though there was a permanent tournament of the nations, competing in terms of their achievements in certain aspects of well-being, and periodically awarded various medals and certificates, to denote the winners, placers, and finishers.
My own view is, as long as our own standards of well-being are at least maintained from before, it is ungenerous to begrudge our neighbors for equaling, or even surpassing, them. It should not annoy me for a neighbor to build a nicer house than mine; I can simply admire it. Neither should it please me if a neighbor fails to maintain his garden as regularly as I do mine.
Yet, especially now that the Philippines takes its turn at chairing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), such cross-nation comparisons are more likely to continue than to taper off. What might we expect to see?
Let’s consider Life Expectancy (LE) at birth, a very traditional indicator of well-being. The table has the Asean countries’ latest rankings in average number of years of LE, across 234 countries, based on United Nations Population Division estimates.
For the world as a whole, the LE average is 73.8 years. The range between the averages of No. 1 Monaco (86.7 years) and No. 234 Nigeria (54.9) is a massive 32 years. In the middle between them, called the median, are No. 117 Cook Islands and No. 118 Brunei, both at 75.8.
Within Asean, the first rank goes to Singapore at about 84—10 years above the world average, yes, but then it is entirely metropolitan. Second and third are Malaysia and Thailand, at 77. Fourth and fifth are Brunei at 76 and Vietnam at 75, close behind. Significantly below, at sixth and seventh, are Indonesia at 72 and Cambodia at 71. Then comes the Philippines, at 70, ranking only eighth within Asean at present. At the rear are Laos (also 70 when rounded), Timor Leste (68), and Myanmar (67).
With the data presented this way, the obvious next question is, what’s different between us and our neighbors? In particular, what have we in the Philippines been doing wrong that our Asean neighbors have been doing right? That is for our specialists in health—regarding mortality and fertility—to answer, but I’ll allow myself two comments.
First, it’s my impression that the Philippine government’s lock-down-reaction to the pandemic in 2020-2021, during the previous administration, was so much harsher than the responses in other countries that it could have raised mortality from other causes aside from COVID-19 itself. The Social Weather Stations surveys, done by telephone, found so much hunger among those unable to return home due to lack of public transportation and closure of residential areas to entry.
Second, there was an unusually high number of deaths—estimated at 20,000 or more—that occurred during the conduct of the drug war, also in the time of then President Rodrigo Duterte, who is now confined at The Hague, for trial by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. How much would the average Filipino life expectancy rise if these deaths—actually they were murders—had not happened?
The mere fact of a higher average life expectancy in most other Asean countries does not, in itself, diminish the well-being of Filipinos. The extra perspective serves to help understand what may be the causes and to devise public and private policies to improve the situation in the Philippines.
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