How is life in Cebu?

The Province of Cebu celebrated its founding anniversary this week which culminated in the giving of a P15,000 bonus for each provincial employee and official. This is good for morale in the Capitol where workers, I believe are just as needy as most of us in the country today. In addition, however, to celebrating our foundation day and enjoying their bonus, officials and workers in the Capitol will do well if they also take time to ask if they have achieved their mission to improve the well-being of the people in the province and enable them to live a good life.

How do we measure a good life? To know if the life of our people is improving, economists mainly use one summative measure – the gross domestic product or GDP that represents the gross value added from all sectors of the economy. The faster the GDP grows, the larger it becomes and the higher is the per capita income.

Many people now question the usefulness of the size of the GDP or per capita income to measure welfare. One reason is that the actual distribution of the GDP to society members is not necessarily fair. Some have more while others have less leading to a socially unacceptable inequity. For example, in the Philippines, the upper 10 percent of the population gets up to 35 percent of total income while the bottom 10 percent get less than 2 percent. Another reason is that faster GDP growth may be unsustainable and achieved only at the cost of the destruction of the environment.

One way to overcome the defect of using the GDP as a measure of welfare is to add more indicators of development. This is being done by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which added achievements in health and education to measure progress. These two indicators are known or accepted for playing a very important role in enabling anyone to face challenges in life or to take advantage of the opportunities that come one’s way. The final composite measure called the Human Development Index or HDI is computed by UNDP to compare the development of countries in the world. The same composite measure of HDI has been computed by province in the country since 1997. What do we know of the Human Development Index of the province of Cebu?

I already mentioned here not long ago that despite what many of us otherwise believe, Cebu has not been on top of the ranking in HDI since the HDI was computed every three years starting 1997. Out of 79 provinces, Cebu only ranked 19th in1997, 29th in 2000, 22nd in 2003 and 26th in 2006. Last month, the 2009 HDI by province was finally released. Here the province was shown to have P42,079 in per capita income, 69.8 years in life expectancy at birth (to measure health) and 7.6 years in mean years of schooling (to measure education). All these was good only in putting Cebu province again at number 26 in HDI ranking among Philippine locales. Compare this to Metro Manila which had P88,967 in per capita income, 68.8 years in life expectancy at birth and 10.2 mean years of schooling.

We really still have much to do to improve well-being in Cebu. It is time not to celebrate.

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My friend Paul, a German who has lived in Argao town for a long time, e-mailed me that he read with great interest my column on the subject of corruption last Wednesday.

He said that the underlying character trait for corruption is greed, it being one of the complex characteristics of the human soul, and its relative prominence varies from person to person. To Paul, greed certainly has various degrees of motivation and viciousness. But he added that it is one thing when a low-paid government employee extorts money to make ends meet at home and quite another when pork barrel funds are redirected to private pockets by the millions and billions of pesos.

I suggested last Tuesday that to stop or minimize corruption, government employees should be paid well. Paul also suggested abolishing the pork barrel system which is in itself the root and cause of all evil. I thought of that too. However, it is Congress itself that passes the budget. With this, I could not imagine how the pork can be removed from the budget. Pork is both bread and butter and the way to affluence for many (not all, of course) of our members of Congress. It is just like the anti-dynasty provision of our 1987 Constitution. It says that a law to this effect would have to be passed by Congress. Given that it will be their own death nail, members of Congress obviously are not interested in passing that law.

Paul also commented on some of the quotations I made about the nature of man. Paul says that Jose Ortega y Gasset’s statement that man has no nature would not survive one second under scientific (biological) scrutiny. Zunxi’s statement, too, that human nature is evil, would not stand one moment in the light of biological science. To Paul, these statements belong to the realm of beliefs, of which there is a plethora.

Paul agrees, however, that it is the human conscious self or the human conscious activity that decides who a person wants to be. This I also agree with because man is endowed with free will. He can be influenced by many factors but in the end, how he conducts himself is his own decision and that whatever the consequence, he must be responsible for it. Once he is caught eating pork, he must pay for it. We know of course that many are not caught because many of us do not care also.

It is time we change ourselves which is really the message of President Benigno Aquino III in his last State of the Nation Address when he talked about transformation. Are we ready to change?