"More FDI for the Philippines?"

Joma's MLM primer, although written some time ago, is nevertheless instructive: "foreign direct investments go mainly into extractive industries and export agriculture to divert the client-state from promoting a well-balanced developing economy into merely improving the infrastructures (road, bridges, ports and the like) for the purpose of reinforcing the unequal exchange of raw materials (and cheap outsourced labor, of course). 

It is definitely not in the interest of an industrial capitalist country to allow a subservient underdeveloped economy to develop into another industrial capitalist country and another competitor." 

Keeping State control of mass transit would allow transportation to develop in parallel with a program of national industrialization. Thus, instead of the goal being merely to transport agricultural products made by undrepaid tenant farmers to the ports, the products of Filipino-based heavy industries will be transported instead. 

We shouldn't forget that countries like South Korea industrialized quickly in the 1970s and 1980s with less FDI than the Philippines is getting today. The problem isn't the Constitutional prohibition against foreign ownership, but rather that local crony capitalists are import dependent and abused their monopoly positions, unlike in South Korea (or China) where their big businesses were disciplined by selling to the global market. This is what Joma calls the “merchant capitalist” character of the big comprador-landlord class. It engages in manufacturing but it imports the majority of its means of production (the tools it uses to keep its factory running, and the expertise needed to repair these tools). 

"More FDI" is a solution that doesn't treat the problem. The problem is the character of the monopolies we have. More likely, as already stated, foreign industries can just connive with the bureaucrats in government. 

Sources: 

Joma's Primer on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism 

https://www.ibon.org/ibon-debunks-economic-cha-cha.../ 

https://www.bworldonline.com/the-oligarchy-during-the.../

 

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