President Ramos score well on economic front

President Ramos score well on economic front

By Cecil Morella

MANILA (AFP): Filipinos no longer curse the dark, and renewed investor confidence has ushered a modest economic rebound as Fidel Ramos reaches the half-way mark tomorrow of his six-year term.

But violent crime and some diplomatic setbacks have taken the shine off his achievements. Resurgent terrorism in the country's south also poses a major challenge for the 67-year-old ex-general who has said he wants to spend more time in the golf course after 1998.

The economy grew 5.1 percent last year and 5.2 percent in the first three months of 1995, with investments providing the major thrust, after Ramos solved a three-year energy crisis, moved to improve infrastructure and opened up key sectors.

He has led leaders of the country's much-weakened communist insurgency, along with Moslem guerrillas, to the negotiating table to work out a political settlement. Peace talks with military rebels who mounted seven coup attempts against his predecessor Corazon Aquino are also underway.

The ruling coalition captured a large congressional majority last month, ensuring it will be no lameduck for the rest of its term.

Major U.S. credit rating agencies have since upgraded the Philippine sovereign debt along with those of several large Filipino firms.

"We believe that the rating agencies' actions reflect a positive assessment of the strengthening fundamental economic and political trends in the Philippines," said Joyce Chang, emerging markets analyst of Salomon Brothers Inc.'s Hong Kong subsidiary in its latest country report.

To be sure, major economic hurdles remain, chief among them the shoring up of public finances through more effective tax collection. Inflation is also rising, which experts warn could eat up whatever gains the economy has made.

Critics say economic expansion has not trickled down, with unemployment remaining in double digits and rising.

The hanging in Singapore in March of Filipina maid Flor Contemplacion forced Ramos to downgrade ties with Singapore and take a long hard look at the fate of 4.5 million of his compatriots working mainly in blue-collar jobs overseas.

And since the Philippines kicked out U.S. military bases in 1992, it has found itself in a territorial dispute with regional giant China, which last year occupied a reef claimed by Manila in the Spratly islands in the South China Sea.

Crime is also a sore point, with the country's police forces -- which Ramos once headed -- held in low esteem due to perceptions that some lawmen are themselves mobsters.

Although the number kidnappings for ransom, rife at the start of his term, has dropped, banks are robbed every week, with heavily armed gangs striking with impunity, on two occasions hitting banks near public functions attended by the president.

Scores of police officers are under investigation for allegedly murdering one such gang and then covering up to make the killings look like a shootout.

A new generation of Islamic extremists is on the warpath in the south, sacking a Christian town with the loss of 53 lives in April and giving the Manila government an impetus to make peace with the mainstream Moslem insurgency.

Ramos, this Roman Catholic country's first Protestant leader, remains on uneasy terms with the church hierarchy, which not only continues to oppose his birth control policies but has taken sides against other government policies including tax reform.

Ramos is constitutionally barred from seeking a second term, but despite denying that his party plans to amend the constitution, he has not yet taken any concrete steps to groom a successor.