The Socio- Economics of Wowowee

The stampede that occurred in the ULTRA stadium last Saturday on the WOWOWEE anniversary was shocking and tragic. Shocking because it should never had happened had there been a better management of the event, and tragic because of the number of deaths and injured. Considering that the crowd had built up as early as Wednesday, and was visible to the organizers and to all, should have alerted them for more planning, better organization, and coordinated implementation and control.

Hindsight is 20/20 vision, still an organization as big as ABS-CBN, aware of the current economic conditions, income distribution, and poverty incidence in the country and in Metro Manila, should have anticipated the drawing power of shows like WOWOWEE. With the feedbacks from the crowds, maybe the over promotion and the over hype were no longer necessary. 30% of the Filipinos are in the C and D economic class, so there are easily 20 million WOWOWEE viewers in the country and 2 million of them are in Metro Manila. Drawing 50,000 of them to a live show with enormous prizes was easy and sure.

Beyond the proximate cause and responsibility for the tragedy - which points to the promoters, the network, and the organizers - some are pointing to the government as the ultimate cause for its failure to alleviate poverty. The poor are clinging to the slimmest chance to get out of poverty that they join any contest. There is some truth to this, but the blame must be in all governments of this country in the last 50 years, and all politicians since that time. The years immediately after WW II had a high percentage of poverty incidence, which was in the 30% to 40% of the population; but there were so much less people then, and these 7 million poor people were spread all over the country. The whole generations from 1950 to 2000 could have been the time to reduce significantly the poverty level in the country, but our leaders bungled it, so we are at the same percentage while the absolute numbers are exploding with our high population growth.

The next 20 years presents a window of opportunity for our politicians to reduce poverty to acceptable lower levels. A country, like any productive assets, has a carrying capacity, and it looks like 100 million people is the optimum population for us. So we need a population management program that will target and maintain 100 million for the next 20 years. Then the next step is to plan and achieve job creation that will reduce unemployment to the 4% to 5% level initiated by a massive infrastructure program in the next 10 years, that will provide the roads and bridges, the ports, the water systems, and the power systems to bring this country up to par with its Asian neighbors like Malaysia and Thailand. Given the One Trillion pesos 2006 government budget for 2006, and the estimated 20% waste that goes to graft and corruption, there is at least 200 million pesos that can be additionally channeled to infrastructure every year, inclusive of the pork barrel of Congress and the Senate.

As was the experience of all countries that improved their infrastructures, these government projects jumpstart and stimulate the rest of the economy that the multiplier effect doubles the economic growth rate and reduces poverty incidence in a span of 10 years, as China, Thailand, Korea, and Malaysia have done.