Behind Asia Now Acknowledges What's Behind a Lack of FDI in the Philippines?

Behind Asia

I wrote a post on whether or not Behind Asia gets what causes a lack of FDI in the Philippines. Granted, Behind Asia could be composed of several people and not just one person running the entire page. Right now, this is a post that hopefully has Behind Asia getting the root cause:

The 1987 Constitution contains a deeply emotional economic rule: The 60/40 provision. It dictates that critical public utilities (like telecom, water, and transport) must be at least 60% owned by Filipinos.

It was written out of a genuine, historical trauma to protect us from foreign colonial exploitation. But look at the unintended macroeconomic consequence: It created the worst local monopolies in Asia. 🇵🇭📉

Because massive foreign telecommunications companies and global infrastructure firms were legally banned from owning majority stakes in the Philippines, they simply didn't invest here.

Who benefited from this? The local Filipino billionaires.

Because foreign competitors were legally locked out of the country, local conglomerates never had to compete. A handful of Filipino families bought up the telecoms, the airlines, and the power grids. Because they had no global rivals to challenge them, they had absolutely zero incentive to lower their prices or improve their excruciatingly slow services.

We accepted the slowest internet and the highest electricity rates in Southeast Asia because we were told it was "patriotic" to be exploited by our own billionaires rather than foreign ones. Protectionism only works if it protects the consumer. If it only protects the monopolies, it is just a nationalist excuse for bad service.

Basically, we all need a certain degree of protectionism. We have examples of protectionism that protect consumers, such as:

1. We don't want to overly rely on cheap imported food. However, we want to welcome FDI to help in agriculture. 
2. We want to have quality imported products, not dumped imported products, which are probably just as bad as any bad local product. We want to encourage FDIs to build their factories instead.
3. We want to prevent social dumping. For example, in FDI, we want environmentally-friendly FDI, not those that don't treat nature with respect. We can have regulations, such as what Singapore does with its businesses, in general. For example, a country with strict regulations and fair wages vs. a country where child labor and poor environmental laws exist. We definitely don't want to have cheaper products at the cost of human ethics. 

Basically, protectionism should be within legislation. Israel's restrictive economy is based on its legislative policies, not within the constitution. Israel's strict policies are about budgetary control, not ownership restrictions. 

Hopefully, Behind Asia has fired whoever wrote that 60-40 isn't an issue! If they did, that would be their best form of sorry for the readers!