Salceda notes only 8,000 FB followers for magazine that ranked PH ‘least safe’

Albay 2nd District Rep. Joey Salceda. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines — An international business magazine with less than 8,000 Facebook followers should not be taken “too seriously,” according to Albay Rep. Joey Salceda.

Salceda, the House ways and means panel chair, was reacting to the Philippines’ dismal ranking in Global Finance magazine’s list of the world’s safest nations.

The international business magazine recently released a report showing the Philippines at the bottom of its list, marking it as the least safe of 134 countries in the world, below Colombia (133rd place) and war-torn Yemen (124th).

3 factors

Global Finance said it considered three factors—war and peace, personal security and natural disaster risk, “including the unique risk factors stemming from COVID-19”—in determining which countries were safe.

Salceda said there were other “useful and productive” global comparisons that give a more comprehensive assessment of measures against COVID-19 that worked or failed in other similarly situated countries.

“For this, I would talk to our multilateral partners, such as the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. I would talk to our counterparts in other countries’ legislatures and in their governments. I would talk to the reputable academia and research institutes of these countries. I would talk to their private sector,” he said.

“I would not take a magazine with just under 8,000 followers on Facebook too seriously, and allow it to take the kind of attention it has received from the national press,” said Salceda, who has more than 453,000 Facebook followers.

Global Finance’s social media accounts showed that it has 7,591 followers on Twitter, over 1,000 subscribers on YouTube and 7,407 likes on its Facebook page.

According to its website, Global Finance is a monthly magazine founded in 1987 with a circulation of 50,050. It claims that its readers are mostly top executives “responsible for making investment and strategic business decisions at multinational companies and financial institutions” in 163 countries.

The magazine selects the best financial institutions around the world each year and prides its website, www.gfmag.com, as a valuable source of data on 192 countries and international financial markets.

Yemen, Venezuela

Salceda, an economist, said the magazine ranked Yemen “where a literal humanitarian crisis is happening, better than the Philippines.”

“Venezuela, where a political crisis bordering on civil war is taking place, is supposed to be safer than the Philippines,” he added.

“If none of that makes sense to you, we should not give it the kind of airtime that it has been allowed to take. The methodology was not even explained well enough to allow us to learn any meaningful lessons from the survey,” Salceda said.

The lawmaker pointed out that “one of our less useful tendencies is we sometimes give oxygen to the wildest claims by even the smallest foreign outfits,” and that Filipinos “tend to seek the approval of foreigners.”