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How do countries compare in terms of receptivity to free market policies?

Between June and August, the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes did a poll of 20,791 in 20 countries. The results were pretty surprising.

The poll, reported recently in the Asian Wall Street Journal, asked respondents to agree or disagree with the statement: The free enterprise system and free market economy is the best system on which to base the future of the world.

Guess who topped the poll in affirmative responses?

Fully 74 percent of Chinese citizens agreed with the statement, much more than other countries considered the home bases of capitalism. That remarkable profile of public opinion will have to be put in the light of the country’s disastrous experience with Maoism and its stupendous growth under a regime of free market policies.

Now too far behind, 73 percent of Filipinos agreed with the proposition. That is significantly higher than American public opinion, placing third in the rankings, where 71 percent of the respondents agreed with the statement about free markets.

At the bottom of the list were the French, who were split right down the middle on their opinion of the free market. Only 59 percent of Italians and 63 percent of Spaniards agreed with the free market proposition.

I find the profile of Filipino public opinion quite significant. It reinforces recent survey findings by our own polling firms that show that, for the first time, a majority of Filipinos support liberalization of the economy and deletion of the protectionist provisions in the present Constitution.

During the intense deliberations of the Consultative Commission on charter change, liberalization of the economy enjoyed the highest degree of consensus among the commissioners. On every other issue, from the form of government to the structure of the Republic, opinion was divided down the line.

It crossed my mind several times during the ConCom debates that perhaps we ought to focus exclusively on amending the Jurassic economic provisions enshrined in the 1987 Constitution. Except for the predictable kicking and screaming by our local Maoists, that surgical operation on our constitutional framework will be broadly welcomed by the public and immediately do wonders for our national economy.

But, of course, amending the deleterious economic provisions in the 1987 Charter is pretty low on the agenda of our politicians. They would rather change the form of government first.

And then, there are those who use federalism as the new opiate of the people. Having lost colonialism or imperialism as the convenient targets of blame, and yet still unwilling to consider the proposition that the quality of local governance in many parts of the country is grossly wanting nor blame the many dysfunctional economic beliefs embedded in the popular culture, they prefer to raise the bogey of "Imperial Manila" as the cause of poverty in the backward regions of the country.

At any rate, there are dramatic changes in the Filipino public’s appreciation of our economic options. Every recent measure of the economic attitudes of Filipinos indicate that. I find these indications encouraging.

For many years, the Philippines was aptly described as a country with a nominally capitalist system but afflicted with a large socialist appetite for subsidies and dole-outs.

To this day, we still observe militant leftist groups advocating patently stupid things like the re-nationalization of the oil industry, public subsidies for power and fuel, legislated wages, rent controls, tariff barriers and government economic intervention of every sort. These advocacies are cynically used as populist baits to draw near-sighted political support for ideological dinosaurs.

To this day, most of our politicians, desperate to be popular, support policies that cause ruin in place of growth. One example is the continuous extension of the rent control law despite the economic evidence that this produces inner-city decay and discourages investments in low-cost housing for rent that will otherwise go a long way in helping relieve the severe housing shortage we face.

To this day, the instinct of our policy-makers is to try and win public support by concealing real costs and forcing government deeper into debt through invisible subsidies. During the last decade, much of our national indebtedness was due to subsidies for rice and power. The National Food Authority operates on an unseemly business model that forces this public corporation to buy high and sell low. Such a business model died long ago with the Soviet Union.

If we truly want to liberate our economy from politics, we ought to banish crass populism from our policy-making. That will probably cause the popularity of our politicians to drops through the floor. But it will bring our people the gift of a robust economy.

As the surveys show, our people seem readier than ever to accept logical economic arguments for doing things that might have once seemed taboo to politicians craving for popularity. The surveys are borne out by what is happening on the ground.

When the RVAT was being considered, the militants exploited the consideration of a truly modern revenue measure as an issue to drum up populist support for their own political agenda. When the imposition of the RVAT finally happened last November, and the beneficial results on currency stability and investor confidence became clear, the protests died down.

When the real costs of generating power were finally charged end-users, there was a lot of grumbling. But now we have reconciled with a regime of real costs and averted further bleeding of the Napocor, helping us reduce the pressure to borrow even more and inviting the dire prospect of a fiscal meltdown.

I noticed motorists at the NLEX have reconciled with the new toll rates imposed in exchange for a world-class motorway. Had that reconciliation happened earlier, we might have completed the expressway all the way to Pangasinan.

The SLEX, by contrast, is deteriorating and the expansion and extension of this road postponed. This was because users of this road mounted strong protests against new toll rates. Today, they suffer the snail’s pace traffic flow of this vital facility.

There are a hundred other examples of where failure to deregulate or privatize because of short-sighted public opinion caused much larger damage to everybody. And there are shining examples, such as in the telecoms sector, of how deregulation can work wonders. But, happily, our public is evolving a better view of the issues.