Businessmirror november 02, 2016

“Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be a clear intent to aid one political party over another.”—Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, in a letter to FBI Director James Comey, after the agency announced it was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private-email server while secretary of state. AP

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“Please, forgive me. I committed a sin that deserves death.”—Choi Soon-sil, the woman at the center of a scandal roiling South Korea, as prosecutors examined whether she used her close ties to President Park Geunhye to pull government strings from the shadows and amass an illicit fortune. AP

“We pinned him down. He’s dead...It was an extremely good job of police work by every agency involved.”—Oklahoma Highway Patrol chief Ricky Adams to The Oklahoman, after a weeklong manhunt for fugitive Michael Dale Vance Jr. ended in a police chase and shootout. AP

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Wednesday, November 2, 2016 Vol. 12 No. 21

Foreign-policy shift cuts e-hiring of Pinoys–study

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By Cai U. Ordinario

@cuo_bm

resident Duterte’s rant versus the United States, European Union (EU) and the United Nations may have, indeed, affected investors’ confidence on the Philippines, if the latest data on e-recruitment activity in the country are to be used as basis.

inside

MODI: “Employers are likely waiting to see if the situation will improve before making hiring decisions.”

According to the latest report released

by Monster.com, the country’s Monster Employment Index (MEI) in September posted a 2-percent contraction, with Continued on A2

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Why we must bury Teddy Locsin Jr.

free fire

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he Vatican announced it is allowing cremation, but the ashes must be buried or kept in one place. Not divided among the grieving as keepsakes nor scattered to the elements whereof bodies are made like the stars in the firmament. Why this so seemingly trivial detail?

The reason is that faith is eroded like journeys of a thousand miles are started by small steps.

We believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. This is not poetry but promise. On the last day—and there will be a last calendar day—Christ shall return to judge those still living and those already dead who must reassemble their remains. And all shall stand in the dock before him in the Court of Last Appeal in the Kingdom of Heaven on a transfigured earth.

And not as spirits but in the bodies in which they sinned or earned grace. Those bodies shall never perish again. They will live bodily, free from sickness, immune to death and, in that perfected condition, suffer or enjoy their lives after death.

What else will happen in the Kingdom of Heaven we can only speculate but this we must take on faith: The dead shall return as they were when they lived but perfected. If we abandon the tradition of keeping the dead intact, we lose by degrees our defining faith that the dead shall return to the earth.

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RESTING PLACE Visitors flock to the Eternal Gardens in Lipa City, Batangas, on Tuesday, All Saints’ Day, to offer flowers and light candles on the graves of their departed loved ones. ROY DOMINGO

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two for one

Moody’s warns weak current account to impact PHL growth

By Bianca Cuaresma

T sports

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Asean members urged to invest in PPP projects

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HE potential weakening of the country’s current account may adversely affect the country’s economic growth, Moody’s Investors Service warned.

“A weakening in the external balances, such as a further deterioration in the current-account balance, together with a fiscal deficit, could expose the country to downside risks,” the international credit watcher said in its latest assessment.

The country’s current account is the

PESO exchange rates n US 48.5150

core component of the Philippines’s balance of payments (BoP) position—or the summary of the country’s transactions with the rest of the world.

The current accoun—the sturdiest component of the country’s gauge in transacting with the rest of the world—has been in surplus since 2003. That extra elbow room cushioned the Philippines in times of external stress, such as economic crisis in the global economy that usually causes contagion to those with weaker current-account surpluses.

However, Moody’s said the local

currency’s depreciation in recent months, as well as higher imports, “has driven a deterioration in the currentaccount balance.”

In the second quarter of the year, the country’s current-account position barely clings to the surplus territory, hitting $65 million—significantly lower than the $3.2-billion surplus seen in the second quarter of last year.

This tepid development pushed the total first semester current-account surplus to $778 million, also slumping from the $5.3-billion surplus. The

OUNTRIES belonging to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) are urged to invest in publicprivate partnership (PPP), particularly in infrastructure projects, as this is a sector wherein insurance companies can put in their money as a zero-risk, high-yield investment. This was according to the Asean Insurance Council (AIC).

Speaking before financial reporters at a forum organized by the Insurance Commission (IC), Evelina F. Pietruschka, secretary-general of the AIC, said some $60 billion is needed every year for infrastructure development across the Southeast Asia region.

She pointed out that investments in PPP programs, specifically on infrastructure development, are where insurance companies can put in their money as a zero-risk, high-yield investment.

“All over Asean, there is an infrastructure gap. And it is here where insurers can provide help. Insurance is not just an industry that sells protection. It is an industry that can actually help build a country,” she said.

Insurance Commissioner Emmanuel F. Dooc welcomed the suggestion, saying the local insurance companies would actually be adding another P250 million each in their respective paid-up capital by year’s end, and 25 percent of this is required to be invested in government securities, which are known to offer negligible returns.

“Once the additional capital comes in, we will have an extra P3.75 billion in available funds, which need to be invested,” Dooc said. “These funds are ready for investing in infrastructure and we hope we can have PPP Bonds where insurance companies can invest in.”

The private sector can very well contribute in infrastructure development given their available resources, and the government can make it risk-free for them by providing guarantees, according to the insurance commissioner. Augusto P. Hidalgo, See “Asean,” A2

See “Moody’s,” A2

n japan 0.4608 n UK 59.0136 n HK 6.2560 n CHINA 7.1546 n singapore 34.7903 n australia 36.8132 n EU 52.8814 n SAUDI arabia 12.9366

Source: BSP (28 October 2016 )

A2 Wednesday, November 2, 2016

News BusinessMirror

Foreign-policy shift cuts e-hiring of Pinoys–study Continued from A1

the new foreign policies blamed as among the factors that made employers shelve their online hiring.

Data showed the country’s MEI declined to 96 in September 2016, from 98 in September 2015. In August the index value was also at 98.

The MEI is a monthly gauge of online job-posting activity in the Philippines, recording the industries and occupations that show the highest and lowest growth in recruitment activity.

“The introduction of new foreign policies and the peso plunge in the Philippines appears to have shaken investor’s confidence, slightly affecting the economy. Employers are likely waiting to see if the situation will improve before making hiring decisions,” Monster.com—

Moody’s. . .

Continued from A1

$778-million current-account surplus in the second half is a huge shortfall from the full-year projection of $5.8 billion for 2016.

In mid-September the central bank admitted the mark-

Asia Pacific and Middle East Managing Director Sanjay Modi said.

Duterte has been dishing out negative statements against the US, EU and even the UN—mainly due to the international community’s reaction to the administration’s anti-drugs campaign—that gave a semblance of major shifts in foreign policy. The industries with the highest contraction in online hiring is the IT and telecom industry, with a 13-percent decline.

This was followed by engineering, construction and real-estate, with a contraction of 8 percent and production/manufacturing, automotive and ancillary, with a decline of 7 percent.

In terms of occupation, the highest contractions were recorded in engineering/production, real estate, as well as marketing and communications, with a decline of

9 percent each.

Human resource and administration jobs online also suffered a contraction of 7 percent. “However, analysts remain confident about the country’s economic growth in the months ahead, so it is not likely the numbers will fall too far behind its earlier performance,” Modi said.

Meanwhile, in terms of top grow th industr ies, education posted the highest growth at 14 percent. This was followed by logistic, courier/freight/transportation, Import/export, shipping at 12 percent and business-process outsourcing /information technology enabled services, 10 percent.

MEI data also showed that top growth occupations in online hiring were led by customer service with a growth of 10 percent followed by purchase/ logistics/ sup-

ply chain at 8 percent and sales and business development, 3 percent.

“According to the Department of Education, the hiring of educators is expected to grow as the country proceeds with the implementation of the K to 12 Transition Program in schools. The tourism sector is also expected to grow to keep up with incoming business opportunities, as China and the Philippines continue to foster healthy relations,” Modi said.

The MEI is based on a real-time review of millions of employers on job opportunities culled from a large representative selection of career web sites and online-job listings across the Philippines.

The index does not ref lect the trend of any one advertiser or source, but is an aggregate measure of the change in job listings across industries.

edly weaker performance of the current account could warrant a revision of their annual projections for the year.

T he lower current-account surplus has been driven by the substantial widening of the tradein-goods deficit, as the country’s import numbers continue to rise in confluence with the declining

exports in recent months. Moody’s joined other institutions in forecasting the Philippines will experience a current-account deficit in 2017, the first in about 14 years.

“The turn reflects the continuation of current trends, including stronger imports on the back of rapid economic growth, stabilizing global oil prices and lackluster

external demand that could weigh on exports and remittances,” Moody’s said. Earlier this year, economists from HSBC, ING Bank Manila and Nomura Global Economics also welcomed a plausible scenario of a current account sinking into a deficit territory due to the weak external demand affecting the country’s trade numbers.

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Asean. . .

Continued from A1

chairman of the Philippine Insurers and Reinsurers Association (Pira), also supported the idea of investing in PPPs, further pointing out long-term projects on disaster-risk reduction and mitigation as the perfect examples of where insurers should invest their money into.

Pietrushcka said such a move can be pioneered by the Philippines and copied by other Asean member-countries. She had visited the country to promote the Asean Insurance Summit, wherein a gathering of top industry leaders will commence on November 22 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

A respected figure in the life-insurance sector in Indonesia, Pietruschka said Indonesia and the Philippines have a lot in common when it comes to insurance.

“Indonesians also do not know how important insurance is. In Indonesia there is a joke that says if you want people not to speak to you, tell them you’re an insurance agent,” she said.

“But that is slowly changing. We are educating Indonesians continuously on the importance of insurance.”

Michael F. Rellosa, present chairman of the AIC, added that educating people about insurance is a priority, especially among the Asean member countries, as the Asean integration commences.

“And we are not stopping there. We are also educating people to be part of insurance because our bench of talents is very shallow. We want young people to be involved in insurance,” Rellosa said. “To be able to attract them, we must first educate them on what insurance is all about and how important it is to our daily lives.”

Dooc further explained that investments made by insurance companies

for infrastructure projects reached an estimated P1 trillion as of end-2015 and 40 percent was explained to be invested in government securities already. “Last year, based on last year’s number, the investment fund reached about P1 trillion and about 40 percent of that are invested in government securities,” he explained. “We have expanded because of bigger premium revenues so that our investible funds have also grown.”

He further pointed out that if all 94 insurance companies in the country complies with the directive of the IC to increase the minimum net-worth from P250 million to P550 million, the insurance industry will see billions of fresh funds.

“Although some companies have already put in more than enough paid-up and have generated more than enough net-worth, we will be realizing several billions of fresh funds because the requirement is that 25 percent of the capital deposited with the IC should be in the form of security deposits,” Dooc said. “So if there are, say, 50 companies putting in fresh P300 million to meet the new requirement, so that will amount easily to P15 billion, that will be placed in the national treasury.”

Dooc further explained that to be able to let insurance companies invest more of their funds, it is requesting the Bureau of the Treasury (BTr) to create more financial instruments wherein the invested funds of the inurance companies can have better yields.

“So our request for the national treasury is to develop or design instruments, that will give us better yield for that P15 billion. That’s P15 billion, that represents 25 percent, so how much is that?

P3.75-billion fresh funds,” he added.

“Maybe they can provide us a PPP, rather than put it in the Treasury and earn 2 percent or 1.5 percent.” Rea Cu

Economy

BusinessMirror Editors: Vittorio V. Vitug and Max V. de Leon • Wednesday, November 2, 2016 A3

news@businessmirror.com.ph

House okays bill creating Davao International Airport Authority

By Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz

A

@joveemarie

lawmaker on Tuesday said the creation of Davao International Airport Authority (DIAA) will spur further economic growth of the surrounding provinces in Mindanao.

PDP-Laban Rep. Mylene GarciaAlbano of Davao City made a statement after the House Committee on Government Enterprises and Privatization recently approved House Bill 2002 seeking to create the DIAA that will administer and operate the Francisco Bangoy International Airport (FBIA), also known as the Davao International Airport, in Davao City.

“The DIAA creation will substan-

tially contribute to the quest of the Davao region to emerge as the premier socioeconomic tourism center not only in the Philippines but also in the Asia-Pacific region. Furthermore, the DIAA creation will also spur further economic growth of the surrounding provinces in Mindanao,” Garcia-Albano said.

Albano said the FBIA is one of the busiest airports in the country, as it serves as the gateway to the sub-

regional trade block known as East Asean Growth Area.

The bloc is the center of economic cooperation in Southeast Asia that aims to accelerate trade, tourism and investment among its participating member-countries, like the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam and lndonesia.

According to Garcia-Albano, it is the best time to enhance the quality of services and competitiveness of FBIA by creating a body that will principally undertake the control, management and supervision of the FBIA, and such other airports that may be established in Davao City and the provinces of Davao.

“The DIAA as a centralized body clothed with corporate personality will focus on adopting policies to exploit the potential of the FBlA to be a first-class international airport and will also implement new technologies and efficient methodologies to improve its competitiveness so as to provide a safe and more efficient

air-transport service, which is an essential element of any growing economy,” she said.

Under the bill, the DIAA shall be responsible for the repair and maintenance of all airport assets and equipment transferred to the DIAA, including, but not limited to, navigational aids, primary and secondary approach radars, instrument landing system, approach runway taxi clearance and all the communication facilities necessary for the efficient operation of the FBIA. During a House hearing, Tourism Undersecretary Benito Bengzon backed the passage of bill.

He said the development of the country’s airports is crucial in the fulfillment of the government’s National Tourism Development Plan (NTDP).

“One of the strategies in the NTDP is that we ensure we will improve international air connectivity, international air access and domestic connectivity to facilitate the entry of

foreign visitors. Because the country is an archipelago, our foreign tourists, approximately 99 percent of them, enter the country through airlines,” he said. “[Also] some countries in Southeast Asia get as much as 70 percent of their visitors arriving or entering by land. We do not have this advantage,” Bengzon added.

Meanwhile, Raul Glorioso, chief of the Aerodrome Development and Management Service of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (Caap), said the FBIA earns at least P200,000 daily from landing and takeoff flights alone.

While the CAAP is supporting the approval of the bill, Glorioso, however, said the government should do a further study with respect to future development and financial requirements to determine how to sustain and fund such development.

“Since we’ll be creating an authority, it needs a subsidy,” Glorioso said.

briefs bello to employers: pay 13th-month pay on time The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) reminded on Tuesday that it is must that employers pay their workers’ 13th-month pay not later than December 24.

“All employers are required to pay their rank-and-file employees the 13thmonth pay, regardless of the nature of their employment, and irrespective of the methods by which their wages are paid, provided they worked for at least one month in a year,” Labor Secretary Silvestre H. Bello III said.

Bello warned employers who fail to pay the 13th-month benefit that they are liable to money claim cases that aggrieved employees may file with any DOLE regional offices.

Labor laws and their implementing rules and regulations mandate the payment of 13th-month pay.

He explained that 13th-month pay is a labor standard provision of the law that the DOLE does not compromise as to its payment.

Under the Labor Code, every covered employer is required to make a report of compliance to the nearest DOLE regional office not later than January 15 of each year.

“Good labor-management relations, increased workers’ and enterprises’ productivity and competiveness result to workers being paid what is due them,” Bello said.

The 13th-month pay is defined to mean one-twelfth (1/12) of the basic salary of an employee within a calendar year.

The basic salary includes all remunerations or earnings paid by an employer to an employee for services rendered, but may not include cost-of-living allowances, profit-sharing payments, cash equivalents of unused vacation and sick-leave credits, overtime pay, premium pay, night-shift differential pay, holiday pay, and all allowances and monetary benefits which are not considered, or integrated as part of the regular or basic salary of the employee. PNA

WATER RATE HIKE IN METRO CEBU LOOMS BEFORE YEAR-END CEBU CITY—The Metropolitan Cebu Water District (MCWD) has announced it will start collecting “guarantee deposits” from consumers starting December, which will be reflected in their bills next month.

Charmaine Rodriguez-Kara, MCWD corporate communications manager, said the fee, which starts at P1,000 for the consumption of 10 cubic meters per month, will be spread over six months.

Kara said the guarantee deposit aims to protect their customers from having to pay bigger fees when they decide to reconnect their water service following a disconnection.

The collection of guarantee deposits has been implemented before but it is only now that the water district decided to intensify their collection due to the presence of new customers.

Kara said guarantee deposits are refundable if a customer decides to have his or her water connection disconnected, such as when the customer decides to move to a new residence.

She said there is no need to secure permission from the Local Water Utilities Administration (LWUA) for the collection of guarantee deposits, since MCWD is not increasing water rates.

In December all customers who started their connection with them in June will be the first to be charged the guarantee deposits, Kara said.

The last time the MCWD imposed any change in the water bill was last year, when it increased its water rates after the LWUA approved it.

MCWD officials said the increase in water rates last year was aimed at improving the water district’s services and enable additional water connections. PNA

D.O.L.E. LAUNCHES OFW ONE-STOP SERVICE CENTER IN BAGUIO BAGUIO CITY—The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) launched on Sunday the one-stop service center at the Baguio Convention Center.

Baguio City Mayor Mauricio Domogan, Labor Secretary Silvestre H. Bello III, assisted by Benguet Gov. Crescencio Pacalso, DOLE Cordillera Regional Office (DOLE-CAR) Officer in Charge Director Exequiel Ronie Guzman launched the onestop service center.

With the said center, it will be easier for the overseas Filipino workers (OFW) from the Cordillera region to secure travel documents, as processing of requirements will now be done in one place, saving them from commuting from one agency to another. PNA

Headstrong A lady entrepreneur cashes in on the growing demand for motorcycle crash helmets at her stall along Andres Bonifacio Avenue in Marikina City. The safety gear, she says, complies with the safety standard set by the government. Nonoy Lacza

CGMA, Pineda, LGU executives draft eastern Pampanga development plan

By Joel P. Mapiles Correspondent

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ITY OF SAN FERNANDO— Pampanga Gov. Lilia Pineda and former President now Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Second District along with local government stakeholders, are now eyeing to develop the eastern part of Pampanga as a competitive destination for tourism and technologybased agriculture by 2020.

Led by Philippine Board of Investments Governor Oliver B. Butalid, a visioning workshop was conducted in this city intended for the towns of Arayat, Magalang, Candaba, San Luis, Santa Ana, Mexico, Apalit and San Simon, which comprise eastern Pampanga.

The inputs and potentials of each town will be integrated to the Pampanga Triangle Development Plan prepared by renowned urban developer Architect Felino Palafox Jr. Butalid said the local government unit (LGU) inputs will also form part of the great urban plan, which is divided into three parts, namely, Eastern Pampanga, Southern Pampanga and the Growth Triangle.

The governor said the LGU workshops in the formulation of vision are based on the capacity and the current status of their respective municipali-

ties, which will greatly help the urban planning of Palafox.

Some of the visions formulated are as follows: for Arayat, “by 2020, Arayat is Pampanga’s top ecotourism destination with modernized agricultural sector and the beginnings of new industry; for Candaba, “by 2020, Candaba will be a sustainable haven for agri-ecotourism, bird watching and duck raising for salted eggs; for Magalang—“by 2020, Magalang is the next Angeles City, with a touch of ecotourism in the Arayat Mountain; for Santa Ana—“the food terminal of eastern Pampanga by 2019; for San Luis—“the premier rice producer in the whole province of Pampanga by 2020; for Apalit—“by 2020, Apalit is a pilgrim tourist destination in Eastern Pampanga and the leading source of human resources for the whole province of Pampanga.

It was also highlighted during the workshop that the municipalities of Eastern Pampanga are being groomed as agro and ecotourism with some established industries.

Butalid said all inputs from the LGUs are feasible and doable in a span of five years.

Pineda said the LGUs, through their planning officers, need to submit their long-term development plans to aid the plan of the development of the Pampanga megalopolis.

HUDCC, DILG tighten shelter aid rule to LGUs

By Cai U. Ordinario @cuo_bm

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ithout a local housing board and plan, local government units (LGUs) cannot avail themselves of shelter assistance from the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC).

Vice President and HUDCC Chairman Maria Leonor G. Robredo said on Monday this is already part of an executive order that is waiting for the signature of President Duterte.

“Our policy in HUDCC that I am enforcing right now is that we will not entertain requests from LGUs if they do not have a housing board and local shelter plan,” Robredo said.

“This is the only way LGUs will be forced to be proactive in local housing [efforts]. We have a draft executive order that was submitted to Malacañang, which will strengthen the coordination between the HUDCC and the DILG [Department of the Interior and Local Government],” she added.

Robredo said without the DILG, the government’s local housing program will not be coordinated. She said the country needs to work using only one comprehensive road map, which has yet to be crafted.

Currently, Robredo said the HUDCC is only using data culled from the Housing Summit last year, which was held in cooperation with the World Bank.

Robredo said the HUDCC has set a deadline of December for all housing policies to be implemented under the Duterte administration.

This is a tall order, Robredo said, given that the task requires not only HUDCC but other agencies, as well. These agencies include the Commission on Audit, Bureau of Internal Revenue and Land Registration Authority.

“The problem is that the work is dependent not only on our agency but also other government agencies, which makes it difficult. We want everything to be done by the government to make it easier for everyone,” Robredo said.

Based on the 2015 Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), Filipinos spend the most on housing rental or rental value second to food. On average, Filipinos spend 12.2 percent of their total expenses on shelter.

Senator urges House to speed up passage of coconut-levy measure

By Azer N. Parrocha Philippines News Agency

S

en. Francis N. Pangilinan on Tuesday asked the House of Representatives to speed up the hearings on the Coconut Trust Fund Bill, which is meant to unlock the P75 billion coco-levy funds for Filipino coconut farmers.

Pangilinan, chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Food, stressed that the Senate has already concluded its hearings on September 1 and is in the process of preparing the committee report.

He pointed out that the passage of the measure would also correct what Pangilinan termed as martial-law injustice.

The P75-billion cocolevy funds were collected from coconut farmers during martial law, purportedly for the development of the coconut industry.

Instead, the collected amount was allegedly misused by cronies of the late strongman former President Ferdinand E. Marcos, and has been trapped in court disputes for more than 40 years. In 2012 the Supreme

Court (SC) ruled that the cocolevy fund is public fund and awarded it to the government for the development of the coconut industry.

“Let’s do it as soon as possible for the sake of our impoverished coconut farmers,” Pangilinan said. “We should not keep our farmers waiting much longer.

This is something that is more than 40 years late.”

Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III and Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol previously said the temporary restraining order (TRO) of the SC is preventing the current administration from using and distributing the fund.

The SC has issued a TROs on two executive orders of former President Benigno S. Aquino III that transferred a portion of the funds to the government’s general fund.

The P75-billion fund is already with the national treasury and cannot be spent without congressional approval or a new law.

“This means Congress needs to enact a legislation that will allow for these funds to be utilized,” Pangilinan said. PNA

The Nation

A4 Wednesday, November 2, 2016 • Editor: Dionio L. Pelayo

BusinessMirror

House opposition to challenge Speaker on death-penalty revival

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By Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz

@joveemarie

RO-LIFE and human-rights campaigners in the House of Representatives are determined to challenge Speaker Pantaleon D. Alvarez’s plan to have his bill bringing back the death penalty passed before the Christmas recess.

“ T he Spea ker h a s t h row n down the gauntlet on the death penalty. We will put up a fight,” Senior Deputy Minority Leader Lito Atienza said.

“The death penalty is the absolute and irreparable deprivation of human rights. It flouts the natural and unassailable right to life,” Atienza added.

“Congress cannot repeal the right to life of every human being—of

every Filipino,” said Atienza, former three-term mayor of Manila.

Atienza was responding to Alvarez’s plan for the House to approve on third and final reading the reimposition of the death penalty for heinous crimes before Congress adjourns for the holidays.

“As far as the House is concerned, we will approve it [the reinstatement of the death penalty] before the Christmas break,” Alva-

rez told reporters.

Alvarez said the House would leave it up to the Department of Justice to specify the mode of putting convicts to death.

“If they want to hang them, shoot them by firing squad, it’s up to them.

The criminals would be dead either way,” he said.

The death penalty did not work before simply because only a handful of executions were actually carried out, Alvarez said.

In reply, Atienza said: “There’s no point in performing another experiment on the death penalty that is bound to fail at the horrible sacrifice of more human lives.”

He said the country already experimented on the death penalty in the past, and it failed to deter crime.

“The certainty of capture and punishment of criminals, regardless of the severity of the penalty itself, is the best deterrence to other wouldbe offenders,” Atienza said.

He also denounced the death

penalty as “infected with economic prejudice and human error.”

“It is bad enough we already have a virtual death penalty in place, with the unabated summary executions of alleged suspects sans the benefit of a full and fair trial,” Atienza said.

In accordance with President Duterte’s wish to revive executions, Alvarez’s bill seeks to mete out the death sentence to offenders convicted of drug felonies, murder, rape, robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, bribery, plunder, parricide, infanticide, destructive arson, piracy and treason.

Atienza prefers that the same offenses be punished with imprisonment for 40 years, or until the convict reaches the age of 70, without the benefit of possible early release.

Congress abolished the death penalty in 2006 as a result of mounting flaws, including the belated discovery of the wrongful execution of Leo Echegaray.

Legislator backs parity in Philippines-US travel conditions

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CONGRESSMANfromMindanao on Monday backed the push for parity in administrative travel conditions between the Philippines and the United States.

“There are two ways we can achieve parity. Either we require Americans traveling to Manila to first secure a Philippine visa, or the US removes the requirement for Filipinos to secure a US visa before they can travel to America,” PDP Laban Rep. Johnny Pimentel of Surigao del Sur said.

The lawmaker said requiring visitors from the US to obtain a Philippine visa could easily generate $125 million, or P6 billion, in incremental revenue for Manila every year.

“This is assuming we ask each visiting American to pay a $160 visa-application fee—the same amount the US Embassy in Manila asks from every Filipino applying

for a US visa,” Pimentel said.

Speaker Pantaleon D. Alvarez earlier supported President Duterte’s call for “reciprocity” in travel rights between the Philippines and the US. Pimentel said parity could mean additional good-paying jobs for college-educated Filipinos trying to enter the Philippine foreign service.

“We could use some of the P6billion annual income to employ a large number of young Filipinos as vice consuls, and deploy them to Philippine consular offices in the US, so they can process the Philippine visa applications of American citizens,” he said.

At present, Filipinos traveling to America, regardless of purpose, have to apply for a US visa, pay a $160 to $265 nonrefundable application fee, and show up for a personal interview with a US vice consul, who may or may not issue a visa.

In contrast, Americans traveling to Manila enjoy visa-free entry into the Philippines for stays of less than 30 days.

“There is nothing anti-American about seeking parity in travel stipulations. This is all about equality in treatment. Our peopleto-people, business-to-business, as well as government-to-government relations with the US remain sound,” Pimentel said.

He said requiring visitors from the US to apply for a Philippine visa would also help weed out criminal offenders attempting to enter Manila.

The lawmaker noted that many American fugitives, including child sex offenders, have found it convenient to seek refuge in the Philippines, owing to their ability to freely enter Manila.

“These fugitives easily blend into our communities because of our

Pineda, Tesda sign agreement on preventive health care

cultural affinity with America,” he pointed out.

Americans comprise the secondlargest group of foreigners visiting the Philippines every year, next only to South Koreans, according to the Department of Tourism.

A total of 779,217 Americans visited the Philippines in 2015, up 7.81 percent from the 722,750 who visited the country in 2014.

From January to August this year, a total of 584,149 Americans visited the Philippines, up 9.96 percent from the 531,217 who visited the country in the same eightmonth period in 2015.

At present, under the Visa Waiver Program of the US, citizens of 38 countries are already allowed to travel to America for tourism, business, or while in transit for up to 90 days, without having to obtain a US visa.

Philippines News Agency

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By Joel P. Mapiles Correspondent

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LARK FIELD—The provincial government headed by Gov. Lilia Pineda and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda), represented by Director General Guiling A. Mamondiong, together with Tesda Central Luzon Director Francisco B. Jucar Jr., have signed a memorandum of agreement (MOA) implementing national preventive health care piloted in Pampanga.

The signing was held in this free port and was witnessed by Lubao Mayor Mylin Pineda Cayabyab, president of Pampanga Mayors’ League, (PML).

The agreement aims to maximize the training, assessment and certification of Barangay Health Services for Capampangans to become competent barangay health assistants.

Preventive health care was first conceptualized by Pineda and was recommended by Lakas-Kampi Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of Pampanga to President Duterte for nationwide implementation.

Mamondiong said the main purpose of the preventive health care is to promote awareness and prevent possible diseases that may break out in the province.

Under the agreement, Tesda is tasked to provide free assessment for Barangay Health Services (BHS) trainees who will be trained by the provincial government.

“Tesda shall also conduct national accreditation of training providers and assess centers for Barangay Health Services on preventive health care plus the accreditation of primary and secondary hospitals as assessment venues and centers,” Mamondiong said.

With this, Tesda will also collaborate with the Department of Health to coordinate the proper training regulations and to provide and accurate and precise trainings to barangay health assistants.

Pineda said the program will advocate and promote preventive health care in conducting household health monitoring to the different barangays of the province.

Mamondiong also announced that Tesda would increase the 30,000 scholarship allocation of Central Luzon to 40,000 and from it, Pampanga will get more than 8,000 Tesda scholars.

“The most important part here is the preventive health-care program, which was adapted by President Duterte, wherein we will be training nurses about ‘caregiving’ and massage therapy. And they will become scholars of Tesda,” Pineda added.

‘It is but right for Filipinos to fish at Panatag Shoal’

By Rene Acosta @reneacostaBM

T

HE return of Filipino fishermen at the Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal was in essence a recognition of the country’s traditional fishing rights in the area that China disputes, National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. said.

“We are back to the traditional fishing ground. Apparently, it was recognized again as a traditional fishing ground,” Esperon said over reports that fishermen have returned to the shoal for their fishing activities, unmolested by Chinese coast guard personnel.

While Chinese paramilitary vessels were still in the area, defense and Malacañang officials said fishermen have been allowed access to the shoal

by China, whose forces in the past even attacked Filipino fishermen with water cannons.

Esperon said that, while there was no official communication from Beijing over the opening up of the Panatag Shoal to Filipinos, its access showed that China has recognized the traditional fishing rights of the country, which is one of the positive sides of President Duterte’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

He said that during the two leader’s meeting, the Chinese president asserted his country’s historical rights over the shoal while Duterte buttressed Manila legal rights over the territory, aside from the face that the United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled that Panatag is a traditional fishing ground of both the Philippines and China.

“There was no agreement, but Duterte believes that China will no longer touch our fishermen there, since the matter was already raised,” Esperon said.

“What exists there is traditional fishing ground, traditional ground.

There is no talk, there is no assertion of rights, but they respect our traditional rights,” he added.

Despite the absence of any agreement between the two leaders, Esperon said he was not surprised over the developments in the area, owing

to the friendly relations developed between the Philippines and Beijing during Duterte’s visit to China.

A military official hoped that the return of fishermen to the shoal will not be temporary, after all, China can show that it can work with the country even with the unreconciled territorial positions.

“I hope that the presence of our fishermen there will be permanent,” he said.

Esperon said the territorial issue should not stand in the way of a good relationship between China and the country.

“Why allow yourselves to be in that confrontational position when you can talk about economic relations, trade relations? But this is not to say we have dropped our claim because we have asserted it also, we have asserted it, the President reiterated it,” he said.

Meanwhile, Party-list Rep. Carlos Isagani T. Zarate of Bayan Muna welcomed reports that Filipino fishermen are now able to fish at the Panatag Shoal without being harassed by the Chinese Coast Guard.

Panatag is a triangular chain of reefs and rocks surrounding a 46-kilometer lagoon, spanning an area of 150 square kilometers that is a traditional fishing ground of Filipino fishermen.

It was seized by China after a two-month standoff with the Philippines in 2012.

Zarate said the “Duterte-style of diplomacy” may have already worked, citing the recent state of Duterte to China, where he met ranking Chinese officials.

“We hope that this will continue.

But, of course, this development should not be a ground to set aside our rightful and adjudged claim on the Panatag Shoal, as ruled by the Permanent Court of Arbitration,” Zarate added.

“Yet, it is encouraging that our fisherfolk who suffered the most as a result of the of the Chinese blockade are now able to fish.”

“What is needed now is to ensure that Filipino fishermen could continue to fish at the Panatag shoal and, at the same time, not compromise our national sovereignty,” Zarate added. With Marvyn N. Benaning

Senator urges revival of military SRDP

By Azer N. Parrocha

Pampanga Gov. Lilia Pineda (seated, from left), Director General Guiling A. Mamondiong of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda) and Tesda Central Luzon Director Francisco B. Jucar Jr. sign the memorandum of agreement implementing national preventive health-care program in the province. Jun Jaso

news@businessmirror.com.ph

EN. Panfilo M. Lacson Sr. on Tuesday urged the Department of National Defense (DND) to revive the Armed Forces Self-Reliance Defense Program to at least be able to produce its own weapons and ammunition.

Lacson made the statement following a report that the United States is halting a planned sale of rifles to the National Police.

“There is now more reason for the Department of National Defense to revive its selfreliance program so we can produce our own weapons and ammunition and other military

hardware,” he said.

Reports from Washington said, according to Senate aides, the US State Department is meaning to stop the planned sale of some 26,000 assault rifles to the National Police after Sen. Ben Cardin said he would oppose it.

Aides further said Cardin was “reluctant for the United States to provide the weapons given concerns about humanrights violations in the Philippines.”

Lacson, a former National Police chief, noted that he has yet to see an investigation that has come to the conclusion that human-rights violations were committed in the intensified anti-

illegal- drug campaign under the current administration.

“I would take US Senator Cardin’s statement as his own opinion and nothing more,” he said.

Lacson, meanwhile, said the Philippines does not stand to lose anything from the US plan to stop the sale of assault rifles to the Philippines, “except one less gun store to choose from.”

“There are tens of other countries that manufacture better and probably cheaper assault rifles than the US,” he said.

The defense department earlier said obtaining defense equipment from China and Russia is currently in its planning stage.

AU REVOIR

The Baguio Country Club hosted a farewell luncheon for US Ambassador Philip S. Goldberg at the Trophy Room of the Manila Polo Club recently.

With Goldberg are Nikko Dizon, Pastor Saycon, BCC Corporate Secretary Valerie Gonzalez, BCC Chairman Rico Agcaoili, BCC House Committee Chairman Patricia Sison and BCC Golf and Grounds Committee Cochairman Louie Sison. MAU VICTA

news@businessmirror.com.ph

AseanWednesday BusinessMirror

Editor: Max V. de Leon • Wednesday, November 2, 2016 A5

Indonesia, China strengthen ties as FDI doubles

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hina’s investment in Indonesia has more than doubled since 2015, as President Joko Widodo’s five meetings with Xi Jinping in the past two years start to pay off.

$1.6B

The amount of China’s investments in Indonesia from January to September

government said the trip would yield $24 billion of state and business deals.

Growth forecast

Foreign direct investment (FDI) from China stood at $1.6 billion from January to September, up from about $600 million for the whole of last year, according to figures from the Indonesia Investment Coordinating Board. Chinese investors pledged $6.1 billion in investment in Indonesia in the ninemonth period.

China is now the No. 3 investor in Indonesia behind Singapore and Japan, overtaking the United States this year, as the world’s second-largest economy looks to shift more of its excess manufacturing capacity offshore. It reflects China’s deepening ties with Indonesia after becoming the nation’s biggest trading partner five years ago and is a win for Widodo as he pushes ahead with an ambitious program to build roads, ports and railways.

“The potential of realized investment from China will remain high in the coming years and it will re-

main in the top 5,” said Azhar Lubis, the board’s deputy chairman for investment supervision. “The biggest challenge is how that interest or those plans can be realized soon.”

The US’s share of FDI to Indonesia has declined to 2 percent, from 8.3 percent in 2013, despite President Barack Obama pledging stronger ties with Asia. China, on the other hand, has increased its push in Southeast Asia with its “OneBelt, One Road” policy, investing in infrastructure across the region to revive an ancient trading route stretching from Asia to Europe.

The project was discussed by Xi and Widodo, as the Indonesian president is known, when they met in Beijing in March last year.

Neighboring Philippines is also seeking more investment from China, with President Duterte announcing an easing of ties with the US, a military ally, after meeting Xi in Beijing in October. The Philippine

Lubis said Chinese investment was mainly directed to mineral smelters, such as nickel and bauxite, as well as in the cement, automotive and steel industries. Chinese FDI in the ninemonth period went to 1,205 projects.

Singapore remains the top investor in Indonesia, with $7.1 billion in the first nine months of the year, compared to $5.9 billion in 2015. FDI from the US slumped to about $400 million, from $2.4 billion in 2013.

Widodo is seeking to boost growth to 7 percent by 2019, a pledge he made when he came to office in 2014. Last week Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said the economy will probably expand 5 percent this year.

“We need investment and China, they have excess capacity,” said David Sumual, chief economist at PT Bank Central Asia in Jakarta. “The two countries need each other.”

The growing economic ties comes at the same time that political tension between the two nations intensifies over lucrative fishing grounds in the South China Sea. Indonesia’s Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti has said tensions with China are now manageable. Bloomberg News

Foreigners sell Thailand stocks as death of king exacerbates economic concerns

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verseas investors are pulling money from Thailand’s stocks at the fastest pace this year.

Foreign funds sold a net $514 million of Thai equities last month, more than five times as much as from the Philippines, with the bulk of the outflows coming after the October 13 death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who had been a source of political stability in a country wracked by numerous coups. While the SET Index has recovered most of its losses from a plunge in the days before the 88-year-old monarch died, valuations remain a concern at a level 22 percent above the 10year average.

The yearlong mourning period and royal transition threaten to restrain economic expansion, according to Capital Economics Ltd. and Nomura Holdings Inc., while Asian airlines and tour operators said that they’re expecting a slowdown in travel to Thailand. The country’s growth rate trails behind its Southeast Asian peers and hasn’t exceeded 3.5 percent since the start of 2013.

“Thailand ’s economy hasn’t been in the pink of health,” said Jen-Ai Chua, an analyst at Bank Julius Baer in Singapore. “The king’s death has exacerbated concerns about the economy.”

The Thai outflows are the most since December 2015 and compare with net selling of $174 million in Indonesia and $94 million in the Philippines, exchange data show.

Some 294.3 million ringgit ($70 million) was pulled from Malaysian shares last month through October 28, according to MIDF Amanah Investment Bank Bhd. Foreign funds pulled $310 million from Thai sovereign bonds in October, also the most since December 2015, while the baht weakened 1.2 percent.

The SET Index plunged 6.5

percent in the three days before the king’s death before recovering 5.1 percent in the next two sessions. The gauge finished the month with a 0.8percent gain, and is up 17 percent this year, the second-best performance among Southeast Asian emerging markets after Indonesia. A gauge of the region’s stocks dropped 2 percent in October, the most since May, as the chance of a Federal Reserve rate hike this year increased.

The Thai benchmark equity measure rose 0.3 percent as of 10 a.m. in Bangkok on Tuesday.

Election timetable

Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha has said Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn has requested a delay in taking the throne to mourn his father along with other Thais. Elections, currently slated for late 2017, won’t be pushed back because of the king’s death, said Prayuth, who took power in a May 2014 military coup.

The negative impact of the king’s death on growth in 2016 is unlikely to be more than 0.1 percentage point, however, if there’s renewed political unrest that could cause the economy to quickly spiral downward, Capital Economics said in a note released on Monday.

There’s downside risk to Nomura’s 3-percent economic growth forecast for 2017, the Japanese lender said in an October 14 note. The economy is going through the transition on a very fragile footing as continuous political change has left much to be done in terms of structural reforms to address the aging population and falling labor productivity, Nomura said in the note.

“The Thai stock market will be unexciting given the sluggish economy,” said Song Seng Wun, a regional economist at CIMB Private Bank in Singapore. “We have seen fairly

subdued domestic consumption in Thailand because of the drought earlier in the year and, with the king’s passing, we will have an even quieter period of economic activity.”

Thailand’s GDP increased 3.5 percent in the second quarter, trailing growth rates of 4 percent in Malaysia, 5.18 percent in Indonesia and 7 percent in the Philippines.

“Sentiment in the country will remain weak for the short term,” said Jalil Rasheed, a Singaporebased fund manager at Invesco Asset Management. “We’ll take advantage of market mispricing to buy more when there’s any weakness.”

The impact of the royal transition will be limited as the government has said it will prop up the economy if it slows further, said Narongsak Plodmechai, the Bangkok-based chief investment officer at SCB Asset Management Co., which oversees around $37 billion.

Third-quarter earnings have been in line with expectations and bad loans at banks are showing signs of stabilizing, helping to support the market, he said.

While tourism will slow during the period of mourning, the drop is unlikely to be significant, he added.

Foreign funds have still pumped a net $3.3 billion into Thai stocks this year amid a rally in emergingmarket assets. That helped push the SET Index’s price-to-earnings ratio to as high as 16.7 in August.

Valuations have since dropped to 15.6, still well above the 10-year average of 12.8.

“We’re trimming our positions as valuations are starting to look expensive,” said Kar Tzen Chow, a Kuala Lumpur-based fund manager at Affin Hwang Asset Management Bhd., which oversees $7.6 billion.

“There’s some uncertainty following the death of the king.”

Bloomberg News

Najib hopes to improve image via trip to Beijing

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alaysia’s prime minister, embattled at home because of a financial scandal that prompted a United States government investigation, hopes to use his visit to Beijing this week to woo new investment and buoy up his image back home, as he is shunned by Western leaders, analysts say.

Prime Minister Najib Razak will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and thirdranking official Zhang Dejiang, the head of the legislature, during his seven-day trip that ends on Sunday.

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hua Chunying said at a briefing on Monday bilateral cooperation agreements covering a “broad range” of areas would be signed during the visit. She gave no details. Najib has been implicated in a US government investigation into massive fraud at a Malaysian investment fund he founded known by the initials 1MDB. The Department of Justice says in a lawsuit seeking to seize assets in the US that at least $3.5 billion was stolen from the fund and diverted through a web of shell companies and bank accounts in Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the US Malaysia’s attorney general has defended Najib, even while his popularity at home has plummeted in recent months.

James Chin, director of the Asia Institute at Australia’s University of

China, for its part, wants to be closer to Malaysia in economic and political terms because it’s trying to draw Malaysia into its sphere of influence.”

—University of Tasmania Tasmania, said Najib wanted to attract more Chinese money to make up for a drop in foreign direct investment from Western countries spooked by the scandal. He also wanted to show that “there are still powerful countries around the world that are still willing to give him the five-star or red-carpet treatment.”

“He’s showing the Malaysian domestic audience that a new upcoming power, like China, is still willing to host him, because it is quite obvious that he can’t get the same treatment in Western capitals anymore,” Chin said.

While Najib has more riding on the visit, the Chinese government is also

keen to increase its clout with Malaysia as it looks to develop its “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Under Xi’s signature foreign-economic expansion strategy, China aims to strengthen land and sea links and bilateral cooperation with the rest of Asia, Africa and Europe. One part of that is a planned high-speed railway from Singapore to the southwest of China, which will pass through Malaysia.

“China, for its part, wants to be closer to Malaysia in economic and political terms because it’s trying to draw Malaysia into its sphere of influence,” Chin said. While Malaysia is one of several Asian nations that has disputed claims with China in the South China Sea, it has been relatively understated compared with the feuding among fellow claimants Vietnam and the Philippines.

Last month Najib said Malaysia would not compromise on its South China Sea claims, but wants them to be hashed out through dialogue and peaceful negotiations.

Relatives of Chinese passengers on MH 370, the Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing in 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, were clamoring to meet with Najib during his visit. About 10 relatives were inside the Foreign Ministry on Tuesday attempting to apply for a meeting to raise their questions and complaints about the search for the plane. AP

A6

The World

Wednesday, November 2, 2016 • Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

BusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Clinton aides cry ‘double standard’ as DOJ vows quick action on e-mails

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Obama’s Halloween ‘Thriller’ President Barack Obama and the first

lady Michelle Obama dance to the beat of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as they welcome children from Washington area and children of military families to trick-or-treat celebrating Halloween at the White House in Washington, on Monday. AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta

2B children breathe toxic air worldwide, Unicef says

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EW DELHI—As Indians awoke on Monday to smokefilled skies from a weekend of festival fireworks, New Delhi’s worst season for air pollution began—with dire consequences.

A new report from United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) says about a third of the 2 billion children in the world who are breathing toxic air live in northern India and neighboring countries, risking serious health effects, including damage to their lungs, brains and other organs.

Of that global total, 300 million kids are exposed to pollution levels more than six times higher than standards set by the World Health Organization (WHO), including 220 million in South Asia.

For the Indian capital, the alarming numbers are hardly a surprise. New Delhi’s air pollution, among the world’s worst, spikes every winter because of the season’s weak winds and countless garbage fires set alight to help people stay warm.

Even d ays before t he cit y erupted in annual fireworks celebrations for the Hindu holiday of Diwali, recorded levels of tiny, lung-clogging particulate matter, known as PM 2.5, were considered dangerous on Friday at well above 300 micrograms (mcg) per cubic meter. By Monday morning, the city was recording PM 2.5 levels above 900 mcg per cubic meter— more than 90 times higher than the WHO recommendation of no more than 10 mcg per cubic meter.

“My eyes are irritated, I’m coughing and I find it difficult to breathe,” said 18-year-old Delhi student Dharmendra, who uses only one name as is common in India. Because of the pollution, “I don’t go out so much nowadays.”

New Delhi residents were advised to stay indoors on Monday, with health warnings issued for the young, elderly and those with respiratory or heart conditions.

Officials said the high pollution

300M

The number of children exposed to pollution levels, more than six times higher than standards set by the World Health Organization, including 220 million in South Asia

levels were made worse by the ongoing burning of spent crops in agricultural fields in the neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana.

“Pollution levels every winter gallop, and we are already beginning to see the signs of it,”

said Anumita Roy Chowdhury, executive director of the Centre for Science and Environment, a Delhi-based research and lobbying organization. Some local studies indicate up to a third of Delhi ’s children have impaired lung function and respiratory diseases, like asthma, she said.

“This really signals health disaster.” Children face much higher health risks from air pollution than adults. Children breathe twice as quickly, taking in more air in relation to their body weight, while their brains and immune systems are still developing and vulnerable.

“The impact is commensurately shocking,” with 600,000 children younger than 5 across the world dying every year from air pollution-related diseases, Unicef Executive Director Anthony Lake said in the report released on Monday.

“Millions more suffer from respiratory diseases that diminish their resilience and affect their physical and cognitive development.

Counting 2 billion children breathing unhealthy air—out of a total 2.26 billion world population of children—means the vast majority are being exposed to levels of pollution considered by the WHO to be unsafe.

Out of that 2 billion breathing toxic air, the report puts 620 million of them in South Asia—mostly northern India. Another 520 million children are breathing toxic air in Africa, and 450 million in East Asia, mainly China, according to the report, which combined satellite images of pollution and ground data with demographic patter ns to deter mine which populations fell into the highest risk areas.

Since being identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities in recent years, New Delhi has tried to clean its air. It has barred cargo trucks from city streets, required drivers to buy newer cars that meet higher emissions standards and carried out several weeks of experimental traffic control, limiting the number of cars on the road. But other pollution sources, including construction dust and cooking fires fueled by wood or kerosene, continue unabated.

Last week the city launched a smartphone application called “Change the Air”, inviting residents to send photos and complaints about illegal pollution sources, from the burning of leaves and garbage in public parks to construction crews working without dust control measures. AP

A man covers his face with a scarf as he rides in front of the landmark India Gate, enveloped by smoke and smog, on the morning following Diwali festival in New Delhi, India, on Monday. AP/Manish Swarup

illary Clinton’s campaign accused Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey of applying a double standard by disclosing a renewed inquiry into her e-mails, an hour after the Justice Department offered a bare-bones promise to lawmakers that it would act “expeditiously” to settle the matter.

Clinton campaign officials seized on a CNBC report, citing an unnamed former FBI official, that Comey balked at joining with United States intelligence agencies on October 7 when they blamed Russia for hacking the e-mail systems of US political figures and organizations—including the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman—because it was too close to Election Day. Democrats have excoriated the FBI chief for telling Congress about a new, vaguely defined probe of emails related to Clinton less than two weeks before the end of the US presidential campaign.

“It’s impossible to view this as anything less than a blatant double standard,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said on Monday on a conference call with reporters.

The revelation by Comey that the agency was investigating e-mails found on a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of close Clinton aide Huma Abedin, jolted the presidential race between Clinton and Republican Donald Trump as millions of Americans are casting early ballots and the two candidates are entering the final week of their campaigns.

Bipartisan complaints

Conflicting stories emerged later in the day about whether there were potential links between Trump and Russia. Clinton senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan seized on a Slate story saying a group of computer scientists believes a Trump computer server was communicating with a Russian bank.

The New York Times subsequently reported that the FBI hasn’t found any link between Trump and the Russian government, and that investigators “came to doubt” the server report.

Also on Monday, NBC News reported that the FBI has been conducting a preliminary inquiry into the business connections of Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. In response, Manafort denied any wrongdoing and said Democrats were seeking to divert attention from the FBI investigation into Clinton’s e-mails.

“There is nothing of my business activities to investigate,” Manafort said in a statement to Bloomberg News. “This is presidential politics and nothing more.”

Comey has come under fire from some Republicans, as well as Democrats for providing few details about what his agents are investigating and whether it may change the outcome of the FBI’s earlier investigation of Clinton’s e-mails while she was secretary of state.

Comey announced in July that he was closing that inquiry after finding that Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless” in handling classified information but prosecution wasn’t warranted.

“While I disagree with those who suggest you should have kept the FBI’s discovery secret until after the election, I agree that your disclosure did not go far enough,” Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote in a letter on Monday to Comey. “Without additional context, your disclosure is not fair to Congress, the American people, or Secretary Clinton.”

As the din of complaints from Congress grew louder on Monday, the Justice Department sent a three-paragraph letter to lawmak-

ers telling them that it will move quickly on the new probe and that it was working with the FBI. Comey made his announcement last week over objections from Justice Department officials.

“We assure you that the department will continue to work closely with the FBI and, together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” according to the letter from Assistant Atty. General Peter Kadzik. “We hope this information is helpful.”

White House defense

The White House stepped in to give a modest defense of Comey.

Press Secretary Josh Earnest said on Monday he will “neither defend nor criticize” Comey’s decision to disclose the review of newly discovered e-mails, but he said there’s no reason to believe Comey is “secretly strategizing to benefit one candidate or one political party.

He’s in a tough spot.”

The FBI is now using a computer program to winnow down the number of Abedin e-mails that may be pertinent to the Clinton investigation or whether they are duplicates of what investigators have already seen, according to a person familiar with the matter. That process could conclude this week, the person said.

It’s not yet possible to assess whether a complete review can be finished before Election Day on November 8, the person said.

If investigators find new e-mails with potentially significant or classified material, it will take more time to analyze them, possibly by sending them to other agencies for vetting, said the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss a pending investigation.

Abedin “only learned for the first time on Friday, from press reports, of the possibility that a laptop belonging to Mr. Weiner could contain e-mails of hers,” said Karen Dunn, a lawyer for Abedin, in a statement. “While the FBI has not contacted us about this, Abedin will continue to be, as she always has been, forthcoming and cooperative.”

Political impact

Democrats are starting to fret openly that the outcome of the presidential and congressional races could be affected by Comey’s disclosure and have mounted a concerted effort to contain the political damage by questioning Comey’s motives and focusing on Russia’s interference in the political campaign.

Mook said Clinton’s staff is “completely confident” that the current investigation won’t reveal anything new, echoing the message the Democratic nominee is delivering as she campaigns through battleground states in the final stage of the race.

Mook and Clinton Spokesman Brian Fallon also picked up a line of attack being used by a few members of Congress, notably Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and Representative Elijah Cummings, suggesting that the FBI is looking into possible ties between Trump associates and Russia.

“I do not know how Director Comey will justify his decision to withhold information relating to Trump while publicly announcing ongoing investigative steps against his opponent just days before the election,” said Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee.

Fallon said that if Trump or his allies are being investigated, Comey “should tell us that, too.”

Mook said Comey already has broken with protocol by disclosing the e-mail review and said the “same treatment that has been applied” to Clinton should be given to Trump. Bloomberg News

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The World BusinessMirror

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

A7

Clinton’s immigration plan could help econ more than Trump’s, economists say

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ASHINGTON—When it comes to influencing the speed and direction of the economy, few things will matter more than how the next president deals with the millions of immigrants in the country illegally, and just as crucially, how many new legal immigrants are allowed in each year.

“In terms of where the economy would be four years and 10 years from now, the real difference, the game changer between the two [presidential candidates] is immigration,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

By Moody’s calculations, Hillar y Clinton’s more open-door position on immigration—including a pathway to citizenship for those already in the country illegally and increasing legal immigration—would add about a quarter of a percentage point to GDP growth annually, on average, over the next decade. That translates to an additional $489 billion to the economy by 2026.

Donald Trump’s plan to stem immigration and deport people who are in the US illegally would have the opposite effect, the firm concluded. Moody’s estimates that his immigration policies would reduce inflation-adjusted GDP by nearly half a percentage point, or about $880 billion, by 2026.

The Trump campaign has sharply criticized Moody’s economic projections as biased, noting that Zandi has contributed to Clinton’s campaign. Peter Navarro, a University of California Irvine professor and Trump economic adviser, argued that Trump’s immigration plan would also have a positive effect on both economic and wage growth. Removing immigrants here illegally and toughening penalties and jail terms for unlawful entry would translate into more jobs for American citizens, he said.

“With secure borders, labor participation rates will increase and offset any negative impacts of addressing illegal immigration,” Navarro said in an e-mail response to questions. But economic research groups, on the left, right and center, have generally come to

$300B

The estimated cost to the US over two years if Donald Trump’s plan to deport 11 million immigrants is implemented

similar conclusions as Moody’s.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated recently that Clinton’s immigration plans would boost economic output from the projected long-run growth rate of 2 percent to 2.3 percent a year on average, while Trump’s more restrictive policies would trim GDP growth from 2 percent to 1.7 percent over the next decade.

By comparison, the committee said, the sizable difference between Clinton’s and Trump’s tax policies— Trump is proposing a $6-trillion tax cut compared with Clinton’s $1.4-trillion tax increase over 10 years—was almost negligible as far as average annual GDP growth in the next decade, after taking into account factors, such as spending and the long-term effects of deficits.

The committee’s estimates on the economic impact from immigration were based on an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office of the 2013 immigration bill that passed the Senate but died in the House.

Clinton’s immigration proposals lack specifics, but they are in line with that bill, which would have expanded the overall number of immigrants legally entering the US by as much as 50 percent.

The economic cost of immigration has often been misunderstood

Protesters gather across the street from a restaurant in Chicago before Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spoke to members of the City Club of Chicago in June 2015. AP/Charles Rex Arbogast

in the rancorous, often emotional debate on the campaign trail. Generally speaking, immigration is a boon to the economy. That’s because the nation’s economic output, or GDP, depends heavily on the number of workers and how productive they are. The more workers a country has, the more that economy is likely to produce.

Also, immigrants in the US start businesses at a higher rate than native-born Americans.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a right-leaning think tank, said it’s simple arithmetic that GDP would take a hit from a curtailing of foreign arrivals.

“In the absence of immigration, we will be [like] Japan, progressively older and smaller in population,” he said.

Moreover, Holtz-Eakin noted that Trump’s plans to round up and deport the estimated 11 million immigrants here illegally would cost the US $100 billion to $300 billion over two years when additional enforcement salaries, detention expenses, charter buses and other things are tallied.

Neither Clinton nor Trump have specified what they see as acceptable levels of legal immigration into the US. But Trump, who has made immigration his signature issue and promised to build a wall across the southern US border, has said the

country needs to “control future immigration” to “ensure assimilation.”

In a major speech on immigration in Phoenix in August, Trump said he wanted to “keep immigration levels, measured by population share, within historic norms.”

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and adviser to the Trump campaign, said she did not know precisely what he meant by “historical norms,” which Trump has repeated on numerous occasions. But citing Trump’s statements in his book, Great Again: How to Fix our Crippled America, the economist said that the GOP presidential candidate “wants more legal immigration,” especially those who will contribute to the US economy.

Trump’s book doesn’t address overall immigration levels beyond saying that he “would like to reform and increase immigration in some important ways.”

But some have interpreted his remarks to signal a dramatic tightening of legal immigration.

Over the last 15 years the US has been admitting on average almost 1 million legal immigrants a year, two-thirds based on family relations and the rest mostly for employment purposes or as refugees.

The last quarter of a century has marked the largest wave of immigrants, mostly from Asia and Latin America, since the

mass migration from Europe in the mid-1800s to 1920.

Census figures show that the 43.3 million immigrants last year made up 13.5 percent of the nation’s total population, the highest since 1910 when the foreign-born share was 14.7 percent.

The share dropped to 13.2 percent in 1920—around the time when literacy tests and strict immigration quotas took effect, leading to a continuous decline in the percentage of immigrants, to a low of 4.7 percent in 1970.

Trump has gained attention mostly for his controversial remarks on halting illegal immigration, talking about rapists and criminals crossing the border and banning or restricting Muslim immigrants. But Trump also is “clearly saying we should reduce legal immigration and that it [the number] should be linked to the population,” said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute’s office at the New York University School of Law. Clinton has been less transparent on her legal-immigration plans than Trump. “In Clinton’s web site, there is no mention of any aspect of legal immigration,” Chishti said.

Instead, it speaks about how Clinton “will introduce comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to full and equal citizenship within her first 100 days in office.”

Based on Clinton’s support for

the 2013 immigration bill that failed, Chishti and most other experts believe that immigration will rise under Clinton as many people here illegally gain legal status, more immigrants seek to be reunited with families and employment-based visas are sharply expanded.

Congressional research estimated that enacting the 2013 bill would add 6 million more people to the labor force over a decade and about 9 million more in 20 years.

Overall, that would boost employment, income and investments, although the unemployment rate would rise temporarily and average wages for a period would be slightly lower as a result of the larger pool of workers.

Though some immigration critics and Trump supporters say that those new foreign workers will compete with Americans for jobs, experts say the overall benefit to the economy is positive.

Besides increasing the labor force, even low-skilled immigrant workers add to the economy as consumers. Giovanni Peri, a specialist in international migration economics at UC Davis, said they also hold down costs of farm goods as well as services, and create opportunities for businesses to add higher-paying jobs in sales, clerical or management that are more attractive and likely to be taken by native-born workers.

Clinton’s campaign declined to comment beyond the general outline of her plans posted on her web site. Though research has shown that unskilled immigrant labor can reduce wages of some native-born Americans, especially in low-wage jobs, new arrivals to the US are increasingly coming from more educated and economically well-established backgrounds, diminishing such impacts.

And historical research has found little evidence that immigrants on the whole have a net negative impact on the US economy.

“Instead, new arrivals create winners and losers in the native population and among existing immigrant workers, reducing the wages of low-skilled natives, encouraging some native-born to move away from immigrant gateway cities and spurring capital investment,” Ran Abramitzky of Stanford University and Leah Platt Boustan of UC Los Angeles wrote in a recent paper reviewing immigration in American economic history. Los Angeles Times/TNS

Merge-or-die choice cuts the debt risk of Japan’s shipping giants China factory gauge jumps to 2-year high

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he president of Japan’s biggest shipper told reporters on Monday it was the sight of container businesses worldwide joining forces or collapsing that encouraged him to team up with his nearest local rivals.

Default risk on the debt of Japan’s top three shippers fell as investors cheered their bid to avoid the fate of failed South Korean operator Hanjin Shipping Co. The planned merger between the container arms of Nippon Yusen KK, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd. and Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha Ltd. would create a company controlling 7 percent of the world’s boxshipping trade. The companies expect that the move will result in synergy savings of about ¥110 billion ($1.05 billion) a year.

“We saw that a number of companies were collapsing or merging and the size of firms was increasing,” Tadaaki Naito, president of Nippon Yusen, told reporters in Tokyo on Monday. “If we don’t have scale, then things aren’t going to look pretty.”

W hile industr y leader A .P. Moller-Maersk A/S has embarked on a restructuring program, companies like Hapag-Lloyd AG and France’s CMA CGM SA have bought out smaller rivals to consolidate.

South Korea’s biggest container-shipping line Hanjin Shipping filed for bankruptcy protection in August. Kawasaki Kisen is most heavily dependent on containers for revenue of the three Japanese firms and its credit-default swaps fell the most since July.

“Kawasaki Kisen and Mitsui O.S.K. probably benefit more from the deal, as Nippon Yusen is a pretty good name,” said Tadashi Matsukawa, the Tokyo-based head of fixedincome investment at PineBridge Investments Japan. “The environment for this sector is not very good so this is some good news.”

Mizuho Securities Co. said in a report that the deal is positive for the companies’ credit profiles and it makes sense to seek economies of scale in a business where differentiation is hard. While the merger should take some czompetitive

pressure off the three companies, PineBridge’s Matsukawa said he is still a little skeptical about the benefits from the deal.

The cost to insure Kawasaki Kisen bonds fell 15.5 basis points to 147.5 basis points on Monday, the sharpest decline since July 12, according to data provider CMA. Mitsui O.S.K.’s bond risk dropped 20 basis points to 125 basis points, while Nippon Yusen’s decreased eight points to 69. “ The decision by the three Japanese carriers to merge their container-ship businesses does not come as a complete surprise,” Greg Knowler, a maritime and trade expert at IHS Markit, wrote in a report. “These carrier lines have reported huge losses in some of the past few quarters. What they lack individually is scale, a crucial requirement when competing on the main east-west trades with the big carriers.”

Nippon Yusen’s liner trade business has made a pretax loss for the past three straight quarters, according to a breakdown from the

shipping company. Mitsui O.S.K.’s container-ship operations have made a pretax loss for at least the past 20 quarters, while at Kawasaki Kisen, that business has posted a pretax loss for the past five quarters.

Japan Credit Rating Agency Ltd. said that while it will be watching whether synergies from the merger will improve the companies’ earnings, it will take time for overcapacity of container-ships to be resolved. The deal won’t have any immediate impact on the three’s debt score, the company said in a statement.

Nippon Yusen will own 38 percent of the merged entity while Kawasaki Kisen and Mitsui O.S.K. will each hold 31 percent, according to Monday’s statement from the companies. “There will obviously be an upside if they are able to rationalize their overlapping shipping routes,” said Hidetoshi Ohashi, the chief credit strategist at Mizuho Securities.

“It’s better to do something than not do anything.” Bloomberg News

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hina’s official factory gauge rose to the highest since July 2014, led by new orders, suggesting the economy’s stabilization continued into the fourth quarter as robust consumption underpins demand.

Key points

Manufacturing purchasing managers index (PMI) rose to 51.2 in October, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday, from 50.4 in the prior two months PMI beat all economist forecasts in a Bloomberg survey, with a median estimate of 50.3 Nonmanufacturing PMI rose to 54 from 53.7 in September Separate PMI reading from Caixin Media and Markit Economics rose to 51.2, also beating estimates and climbing to a two-year high. Numbers higher than 50 indicate improving conditions

Big picture

With the economy stabilizing this year and factory-gate prices rising for the first time since 2012, policy-makers are acting to curb risks from soaring home prices, elevated corporate debt and shadow banking products.

Fresh signs of strength may also keep the central bank on hold after keeping

the main rate at a record low for a year.

Still, manufacturers are being squeezed between rising wage and material costs and anemic global demand.

Economist takeaways

“It’s a very strong reading,” Ding Shuang, head of Greater China economic research at Standard Char tered and a former economist at the International Monetary Fund, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Both current and forwardlooking economic indicators bode well for growth in the fourth quarter.”

“The manufacturing reading is robust and is a bit of a surprise to us,” said Iris Pang, senior economist for Greater China at Natixis SA in Hong Kong. “Materials prices jumped a lot, which has contributed to the surge. Since PMI and producer price index (PPI) are co-related, the PPI will very likely be in positive territory.”

“This might be as good as it gets,” said Frederic Neumann, cohead of Asian economic research at HSBC Holdings Plc in Hong Kong. “Generous stimulus injected earlier this year is still winding itself through the economy. However, with the government tapping the brakes of late in the property sector, growth will likely cool again in the coming months.” Bloomberg News

A8

The World

Wednesday, November 2, 2016 • Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

BusinessMirror

Venezuela’s govt, opposition agree to cool rhetoric after 1st round of talks

briefs

Japan protests China’s drilling in East China Sea

TOKYO—Japan’s government has lodged a protest with China over drilling activity in the waters between the two countries. Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said on Tuesday Japan had confirmed that a moored Chinese drilling ship is conducting some kind of activity in the East China Sea. He called China’s oil-and-gas exploration efforts “extremely regrettable” at a time when the maritime boundaries between Japan and China have not been established.

Japan has complained about similar activity before, largely in the waters between the Chinese mainland and Okinawa and other southern Japanese islands. The two countries are also entangled in a dispute over a group of uninhabited islands that they both claim farther south in the East China Sea. AP

Philadelphia transit strike begins, sending commuters scrambling PHILADELPHIA—Transit workers in Philadelphia are hitting the picket lines on Tuesday and commuters are scrambling to make alternate plans after the city’s main transit agency and a union representing about 4,700 workers failed to reach a contract agreement.

The union went on strike at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, shutting down Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (Septa) buses, trolleys and subways that provide about 900,000 rides a day.

The strike does not affect commuter rail lines and service in areas outside the city.

“Despite months of constructive and innovative proposals from our side of the table, management has refused to budge on key issues, including safety issues, that would save lives and not cost Septa a dime,” said TWU Local 234 President Willie Brown, who heads the union’s negotiating team. “There is no new agreement, so we are on strike.” Brown said union members will not report for their shifts at Septa, and will instead report for picket duty. AP

Rescuers trying to find 18 still trapped by mine blast in China

BEIJING—Hundreds of rescuers on Tuesday were struggling to find 18 coal miners still trapped a day after a gas explosion killed 15 of their colleagues in western China.

Whether the 18 are alive was not known more than 24 hours after the blast ripped through the privately owned Jinshangou mine in the sprawling Chongqing region. Just two miners were confirmed to have survived the blast. Thirteen fatalities had been confirmed on Tuesday morning. Later, two more bodies were recovered from among the 33 left in the shaft following the explosion, Xinhua News Agency reported.

The searchers were being hindered by debris blocking some of the mine’s passageways. AP

Iraqi forces poised to enter Mosul

The fight against Islamic State is finally coming to Mosul, Iraq. With Iraq’s prime minister vowing to cut off “the head of the snake,” elite government forces were said to be less than a mile from the city’s eastern limits and poised to breach that boundary, perhaps within hours.

The commander of Iraqi special forces, Brig. Gen. Haider Fadhil, said his troops would soon enter Mosul and “liberate it,” The Associated Press reported.

The Reuters news agency quoted a force commander as saying Iraqi troops had entered an eastern suburb. But the fight to retake Mosul from the Sunni Muslim extremists could involve weeks or months of brutal urban warfare.

This apparent new phase of the battle comes two weeks after the start of a long-awaited offensive by tens of thousands of Americanbacked Iraqi and Kurdish troops, tribal fighters and militias. TNS

www.businessmirror.com.ph

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Pope Francis (center) is flanked by the General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation Rev. Martin Junge (right) and the President of the Lutheran World Federation Bishop Munib Younan, during an ecumenical prayer at Lund’s Lutheran Cathedral in Sweden on Monday.

Francis traveled to secular Sweden on Monday to mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, a remarkably bold gesture, given his very own Jesuit religious order was founded to defend the faith against Martin Luther’s “heretical” reforms five centuries ago. AP/Andrew

Pope on Reformation: Forgive ‘errors’ of past, forge unity Medichini

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UND, Sweden—Pope Francis urged Catholics and Lutherans on Monday to forgive the “errors” of the past and forge a future together, including sharing the Eucharist, as he marked the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation by traveling to secular Sweden with a message of Christian unity.

Francis and the leaders of the Lutheran World Federation presided over an ecumenical prayer service in the Lund cathedral, the first time a pope has commemorated the anniversary of Martin Luther’s revolt with such a symbolically powerful gesture.

Francis quoted Luther and praised him for having restored the centrality of Scripture to the church. “The spiritual experience of Martin Luther challenges us to remember that apart from God, we can do nothing,” Francis said.

Francis and the Lutheran federation president, Bishop Munib Younan, drew sustained applause at the end of the service when they signed a joint declaration pledging to improve relations through dialogue, while working together to heal conflicts, welcome refugees and care for the planet.

The goal of the theological dialogue, the statement said, was to bring Catholics and Lutherans together at the Eucharistic table.

Disputes over whether Catholics and Lutherans can receive

500

The anniversary of the Protestant Reformation that was marked by Pope Francis by traveling to Sweden

Communion in one another’s churches remain an obstacle after five decades of theological talks.

The Protestant Reformation started in 1517 after Luther nailed 95 theses on the church door in the town of Wittenberg, Germany, denouncing what he saw as the abuses of the Catholic Church, especially the sale of indulgences.

Pope Leo X excommunicated him, but the church couldn’t stop his teachings from spreading throughout northern Europe or the world, leading to the great schism in Western Christianity.

As Protestantism spread, religious wars erupted, including the Thirty Years’ War in 1618 to 1648, one of Europe’s bloodiest conflicts.

In Sweden Catholics who rejected the new Lutheran faith were punished with deportation or death.

As a result, the pope’s visit to Sweden to kick-start the yearlong Protestant anniversary initially raised eyebrows. But the Vatican and Lutheran church both insisted the event was no celebration of Luther’s revolt. Rather, they stressed it was a solemn commemoration to ask forgiveness for the schism and rejoice that relations have improved. Francis’s visit “is proof of how far we have come ecumenically over the past 25 to 30 years,” said Lisa Valkehed, a Lutheran watching the Lund event at a nearby arena.

In alternating prayers in the Lund cathedral, the Catholic and Lutheran leaders lamented the divisions and guilt of the “wound” to Christianity and asked forgiveness for the deaths and pain that their divisions caused over history. “ We have the oppor tunit y to mend a critical moment of our history by moving beyond the controversies and disagreements that have often prevented us from understanding one another,” Francis said. “We, too, must look with love and honesty at our past, recognizing error and seeking forgiveness, for God alone is our judge.”

His appeal was well-received.

“It cannot just be Pope Francis who puts action behind the words that Catholics and Lutherans must get closer to each other,” said Ewa Siekierski, a Danish Catholic who

crossed over from Copenhagen into Sweden to see the pope. “We— ordinary Catholics—must also do [our part] for it to become a reality.”

After the Lund event, the Vatican and Lutheran delegations rode together on a bus to attend an event highlighting both churches’ peace-making and humanitarian efforts. An Indian environmental activist, the bishop of besieged Aleppo, Syria, a Colombian peacemaker, a Burundian refugee and a South Sudanese refugee athlete headlined the event.

“Our historic gathering today is sending a message to the entire world that strongly held religious commitments can lead toward peaceful reconciliation, rather than always contributing more conflict to our already troubled world,” said Younan, the president of the Lutheran federation who was born to Palestinian refugees.

Francis continues his visit on Tuesday with a Catholic Mass in the Malmo sports stadium, added in at the last minute after Sweden’s tiny Catholic community balked that Francis was ignoring them and coming only for the Protestant commemoration.

Years ago, Francis spoke harshly of the Protestant reformers. But in the run-up to the trip, he has had only words of praise for Luther. He recently called the German theologian a reformer of his time who rightly criticized a church that was “no model to imitate.”

“There was corruption in the church, worldliness, attachment to money and power,” Francis told reporters this summer.

They are the same abuses Francis has criticized in the 21st-century Catholic Church he now leads. AP

Alabama explosion shuts gas pipeline, shortages possible

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ELENA, A labama—For the second time in two months, a pipeline that supplies gasoline to millions of people was shut down, raising the specter of another round of gas shortages and price increases.

The disruption occurred when a track hoe—a machine used t o re mo v e d i r t — s t r u c k t he pipeline, ignited gasoline and caused an explosion on Monday that sent f lames and thick black smoke soaring over a forest in northern Alabama, Colonial Pipeline said. One worker was killed and a half dozen were injured. A September leak that spilled 252,000 to 336,000 gal-

lons of gasoline occurred not far from the location of Monday’s explosion. That leak led to days of dry pumps and higher gas prices in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas while repairs were made. The cause of the leak still has not been determined, and the effects of the latest disruption weren’t immediately clear.

Colonial Pipeline, based in Alpharetta, Georgia, operates 5,599 miles of pipelines, transporting more than 100 million gallons daily of gasoline, jet fuel, home heating oil and other hazardous liquids in 13 states and the District of Columbia, according to company filings. Authorities have not said

which type of fuel was involved in the explosion on Monday.

Plagued by a severe drought after weeks without rain, the section of the state where the explosion happened has been scarred by multiple wildfires in recent weeks, and crews worked to keep the blaze from spreading.

Coleen Vansant, a spokesman with the Alabama Forestry Commission, said crews built a 75-footlong earthen dam to contain burning fuel. The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said the blaze had been contained but it was unclear how long the fire may take to burn out.

Two wildfires caused by the explosion burned 31 acres of land,

Vansant said. “We’ll just hope and pray for the best,” Gov. Robert Bentley said in a statement.

Houses around the blast scene were evacuated, and sheriff ’s Capt. Jeff Hartley said it wasn’t clear when people might be able to return home. Eight or nine subcontractors were working on the pipeline when it exploded about 3 p.m. on Monday, sheriff ’s Maj. Ken Burchfield told Al.com. The conditions of those hurt weren’t immediately known.

“Colonial’s top priorities are the health and safety of the work crew on site and protection of the public,” the company said in a brief statement. AP

ARACAS, Venezuela—Representatives from Venezuela’s government and the opposition alliance agreed to tone down fierce rhetoric and hold further meetings amid a political standoff after a first round of exploratory talks about a Vaticanmediated dialogue.

“The government and opposition promised to diminish the aggressive tone of the language being used in the political debate,” Claudio Maria Celli, the Vatican’s representative, read in a statement after the talks concluded late on Sunday night past 2 a.m., adding that the meeting was “constructive and respectful.”

The opposition and government agreed to set up four working groups to discuss issues, including the respect for the rule of law and national sovereignty; human rights and reparations to victims; the economy; and the generation of conf idence and the electoral schedule, Celli said, adding that the current situation of political prisoners in the countr y would be reviewed.

T he opposit ion a l l iance, known as MUD, said in a separate statement that the next formal meeting would take place on November 11.

As state telev ision showed images of the meeting earlier on Sunday evening, with President Nicolas Maduro seated at the head of a negotiating table, the opposition alliance said in a separate statement that it would walk away from any talks if its demands to end “repression and persecution” and free political prisoners weren’t met soon. “ We have to be optimistic when it comes to peace,” Maduro said earlier in the night during televised comments from the talks. “There is no alternative to dialogue.” State television didn’t immediately carry any comments from the opposition’s delegation.

Maduro met with Pope Francis in Rome last week after the opposition alliance confirmed that the Vatican had sent a representative to Venezuela’s capital.

Tensions have been rising since the national electoral council earlier this month suspended a re c a l l refere ndu m pro cess against Maduro being sought by the opposition.

Last week Maduro threatened to jail anyone he accused of violating the constitution, including lawmakers, as the opposition-controlled National Assembly summoned him to testify in a political trial set for Tuesday. After a lukewarm turnout for a one-day national strike that opposition called on Friday, Maduro made a sexual reference in front of assembled schoolchildren and said the opposition “needs a little Viagra to see if they can get something up in country.”

The opposition alliance, which has called on supporters to march to the presidential palace on Thursday if the referendum process wasn’t reactivated, said on Sunday in its statement that it would maintain its protest agenda to push for urgent political change.

While representatives of three opposition par ties, including Accion Democratica, Un Nuevo Tiempo and the Primero Justicia party, led by Gov. Henrique Capriles, attended the talks; the Voluntad Popular party, which is led by its jailed leader Leopoldo Lopez did not attend. Voluntad Popular may join the talks at a later date if its conditions that include the release of political prisoners are addressed, MUD said.

Maduro’s administration is engaging in the Vatican-mediated talks to alleviate international pressure, divide the opposition and buy time, according to the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. Bloomberg News/TNS

news@businessmirror.com.ph

ExportUnlimited BusinessMirror

PCA, DTI’s CIAP-POCB present construction opportunities in Fiji, PNG, Solomon Islands

Editor: Efleda P. Campos • Wednesday, November 2, 2016 A9

Diversifying PHL exports: The US Generalized System of Preferences

By Raymond Batac

Foreign Trade Service Corps Department of Trade and Industry

MARKET DEVELOPMENT UPDATES

By Gliceria N. Cademia

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Trade and Industry Development Specialist Services Division, DTI-EMB

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N today’s marketplace of sophisticated consumers, efficient supply chains and advanced logistics, exporters are constantly searching for new opportunities to expand their businesses globally. With the recent manufacturing resurgence in the Philippines, our country is steadily establishing itself as a major exporter of quality goods to different parts of the world. Due to economies of scale and a cost-effective manufacturing environment, our major trading partners look to the Philippines as a major source of electronics components, automotive parts and processed foods.

HE Philippine Constructors Association Inc. (PCA), in partnership with the Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI) Construction Industry Authority of the Philippines’s (CIAP) Philippine Overseas Construction Board (POCB), held the fifth Philippine Overseas Construction Symposium on October 20 at Hotel Jen in Pasay City.

Ruth B. Castelo, undersecretary of CIAP, assured the construction industry of government assistance. She said Filipinos who have sustained construction business abroad contribute 16 percent to the GDP. CIAP also launched its information and application systems, which include Construction Licensi ng Infor m at ion System (CLIRS) and POCB Corporate Export Information System (CEIS).

Philippine constructors can register and submit their application online for a fee. These are expected to be fully operational in the first quarter of 2017.

The symposium was participated in by officials of Philippine construction companies, the CIAP Family, POCB, Philippine Contractors Accreditation Board (PCAB), Philippine Domestic Construction Board, Construction Manpower Development Foundation (CMDF), the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), the Japan Embassy, the Philippine Export/Import Credit Agency (Philexim), DTI-Export Marketing Bureau (EMB), United Power System Philippines Inc. (UPSPI), the Philippine Construc-

tors Association Inc. (PCA), the Council of Engineering Consultants of the Philippines and the Antipolo City Institute of Technology (A1TECH), the only Philippine higher-education institution, which offers a construction engineering degree.

The symposium discussed labormarket opportunities and prospects in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG); orientation on the Quadruple “A” Category; the practice of engineering, procurement construction (EPC); and undertaking overseas construction in Brunei Darussalam and Lao PDR. Levinson C. Alcantara, director of Marketing Branch of the POEA, said Executive Order 1022 provides no restrictions on the deployment of overseas contract workers to Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

In Fiji, land, particularly land outside urban areas, is mostly held under customary ownership; hence private investors may seek long-term leasehold as freed tenure may not yet be an option.

PNG offers a good employment potential due to its prime investments in liquefied natural gas (LNG) extraction and the

Undersecretary lawyer Ruth B. Castelo for ciap delivers the welcome remarks in the fifth Philippine Overseas Construction Symposium held at the Hotel Jen, Pasay City, on October 20.

country’s emphasis on mining for export. The government is investing heavily in delivering services, including better roads.

In Solomon Island transport and communications in rural areas remain limited. Inadequate infrastructure due to poor urban planning presents opportunities for Philippine constructors to tap.

Quadruple “A” category is a new category being provided to constructors. Foreign-owned constructors can benefit from this provided that the regular license has an annotation that they may engage in general engineering (horizontal) projects P3 billion and above and general building (vertical) projects P5 billion above and have submitted other requirements by the POCB. Joseph Leland D. Sarmiento, AMO, Whessoe Philippines Construction Inc., presented the Nam Ngum and Xayaburi HEPP projects they constructed in Laos.

Salvador P. Castro Jr., chairman and president of SPCastro Inc., said in doing construction overseas, constructors must know their

strengths and weaknesses; identify which market they can penetrate; balance their strengths with identified markets; and study and understand the law of the country they intend to do business in: They must master the professional regulatory requirements, contracts and obligations and professional liability; taxation and repatriation of earnings, and resolution of disputes in the country. He advised interested constructors not to be too ambitious and never give up.

Castro presented the buildings they constructed in Brunei: the Istana Nurul Imam (Negara Brunei Darussalam); the Brunei International Convention Center; the Masjid Jame Asr Hassanil Bolkia (The Sultan’s Mosque); the Royal Regalia (His Majesty the Sultan’s Museum); Royal Pavilion; Bolkia Housing “A” and “B”; Multipurpose Hall and Pedestrian Mall (National Sports Complex); and the Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkia. In Abu Dhabi they constructed the Sea Palace and Al Bateen Park. Castro added that Brunei puts premium on the timely delivery of the projects.

Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) programs were established by countries, such as Australia, Canada, Japan, the European Union and the United States, to allow for reduced or zero tariff rates on selected products, when imported from developing and least-developed countries. According to the United Nations Committee on Trade and Development (Unctad), the general objectives of GSP programs are to assist developing countries “to increase their export earnings, promote their industrialization and accelerate their rates of economic growth.”

The United States GSP program was instituted on January 1, 1976, and authorized under the Trade Act of 1974.

US Congress renews GSP periodically, and the current authorization of the program expires on December 31, 2017.

The Philippines has been a US-GSP beneficiary since the program’s inception.

Looking at our utilization of US GSP, United States International Trade Commission (USITC) data showed US total imports from the Philippines in 2015 stood at $10.2 billion, with $1.3 billion of those imports claimed under the program. The top 10 imports from the Philippines subject to GSP treatment in 2015 were valued at $504.3 million, which would have been imposed tariffs ranging from 2 percent to 14.9 percent under the Most Favored Nation (MFN) rates.

On the one hand, Philippine export-

ers realize advantages over other country suppliers through this enhanced market access into the US. On the other hand, our exporters claimed only 586 of the total 3,500 tariff lines eligible for GSP treatment, while India and Thailand claimed around 1,800 and 1,060 tariff lines, respectively. While not all GSP tariff lines are products of interest to the Philippines and would be subjected to other nontariff measures when exported to the US, there are certainly opportunities to expand our utilization. We can move toward this goal by ensuring our exporters claim GSP benefits for qualified products and making our micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) aware of the opportunities under GSP. Beneficiary countries and interested parties may also petition to add products of interest into the GSP scheme, subject to an approval process by the US government.

GSP programs, such as the one provided by the US, are nonreciprocal, nondiscriminatory, and have the potential to expand the reach of Philippine products to major foreign markets, and cultivate opportunities for our exporters and MSMEs to participate on the global stage. Increasing the Philippines’s utilization of the scheme is another tool for our exporters to internationalize as the Philippines continues on its path to expand its market access through trade agreements with our economic partners.

DTI-EMB establishes cross promotion with Hong Kong I

NVEST HK, in partnership with the Export Marketing Bureau (EMB) of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), gathered Philippine exporters at Makati Shangri-La Hotel on October 13 for a discussion on business opportunities in Hong Kong, focused on leveraging exporting services through commercial presence (Mode 3).

The event was attended by delegates from the food, business-process management/outsourcing, construction, franchising, games and animation, jewellery, government and tourism sectors, and from the Philippine Young Entrepreneur Association and Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines Inc. DTI-EMB Assistant Director Anthony Rivera said, “EMB is pleased to collaborate with the HK economic and trade office. We have shown support to one of our major trading partners. This event has been organized way back three months ago.

As we move toward the new era of trade, we have coorganized this event to explore more about our common interests and to leverage on this event to further collaborate and identify business opportunities which the Philippines and Hong Kong could expand together. This is what we see now as cross promotion, a vital element for us to combine our common interests to move ahead and grow.

“We have strong business connec-

ASSOCIATE Director General Jimmy Chang of Invest HK talks about doing business in Hong Kong on October 13 at the Makati Shangri-La Hotel.

tions in various industries, including tourism. Our connections are strong both in business and in pleasure. In 2015 our bilateral trade was $8 billion, with exports at $6.4 billion and imports at $1.1 billion.

“In 2015 Hong Kong was the fifth major trading partner of the Philippines, third-biggest export market and 12th importer which keeps trade growing. As we nurture each other in trade activities, our total growth from 2011-2015 has averaged around 12 percent.

Our tourists going to HK totalled 704,000 in 2015 with an increase of around 10.9 percent from 2014.

“With this ever-present open window of opportunity we intend to visit Hong Kong together with our business community next year to nurture our business relations and pursue new business activities

as part of the commitments being considered in line with the Philippine Export Development Plan.”

Dr. Jimmy Chiang, associate director general of Invest HK, presented in the meeting Hong Kong’s one-country, two-system principle, where investors enjoy unique advantages in Hong Kong as a region of China.

China blessed Hong Kong with direct exposure to tremendous opportunities from China, the second-largest economy in the world.

Hong Kong is known to be “the super connector” between China and the world. At the same time, Hong Kong practices its own party system, sound legal system and enjoys an independent judiciary, which upholds intellectual property laws favorable to investor interests.

Hong Kong adopts simple taxa-

tion with 16.5-percent rate for companies and 2 percent to 15 percent tax rate for employees. Interest income, capital gains and dividends are not subject to tax. It has no import tariff with exemption on car, petrol and tobacco.

It is strategically located because it is just a four-hour flight from key markets and five hours from countries constituting half of the world’s population. It is three hours from Beijing and two hours from Manila.

HK’s global connectivity is facilitated by 11,000 flights per day operated by more than a 100 airlines serving 190 destinations worldwide, including 50 in mainland China. Hong Kong has the busiest airport and one of the busiest container ports in the world.

A lot of multinational companies have regional headquarters in Hong Kong, such as Nissan, the Japanese car maker.

More than making it a regional headquarters, the vice chairman of GE works in Hong Kong to do all business activities outside the US. Hong Kong is not just for big companies, but also for start-ups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which are creating new ventures. In recent years, overseas companies are injecting a lot of energy in incubators. According to surveys, there are 16,000 start-up companies set up in Hong Kong in 2015 representing a year-on-year

increase of 46 percent.

Aside from funding technology and innovation incubators and startups, Hong Kong employs a professional team and has a comprehensive web site dedicated to start-ups. It has a signature event, known as the Hong Kong Festival, to attract and encourage entrepreneurs, investors, research-and-development centers, start-up and other business stakeholders from all over the world do exchanges and networking. The next festival is scheduled in January 2017.

With “Belt and Road” initiatives, Hong Kong aims to enhance political,

economic and cultural cooperation among more than 60 countries situated along an economic belt and road.

In line with this, a lot of infrastructure related to transportation, electricity and telecommunications will be built.

Hong Kong complements this project with very strong professional legal, accounting and engineering services. As an international financial center, HK is able to raise capital for this Belt and Road project. International companies, including Philippine companies are encouraged to harness the Belt and Road opportunities in Asia.

Gliceria N. Cademia

upcoming events Compiled by Louise Kaye G. Mendoza DTI-EMB Knowledge Processing Division

NOV 7

Time: 8-1 p.m.

Event: Doing Business with the US for Food Products Info Session

One-on-one Consultation on the Doing Business with the US for Food Products Venue: DTI International Building, 375 Sen. Gil Puyat Avenue, Makati City

NOV 8

Event: Doing Business with the US for Food Products Info Session Venue: Bacolod City

NOV 9

Event: Doing Business with the US for Food Products Info Session Venue: Legazpi City

A10 Wednesday, November 2, 2016 • Editor: Angel R. Calso

Opinion BusinessMirror

editorial

Free trade’s bleak outlook

A

fter years of talks and a week or two of comic opera, Canada and the European Union (EU) stifled resistance from Wallonia—the Frenchspeaking part of Belgium—and signed their Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta). It was a good result, though with disturbing implications.

Ceta is a new kind of free-trade agreement. Going far beyond the elimination of most tariffs on goods, it also breaks down nontariff barriers, and aims to foster trade in services and increase flows of foreign investment. Think of it as a scaled-down version of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) the United States hopes to reach with the EU. Even though the Walloons’ objections to Ceta were dealt with, after a fashion, the episode inspires little confidence in TTIP’s prospects.

Ceta will now go ahead in two stages. Tariff reductions and other conventional trade measures will happen “provisionally” starting next year, but some of the reforms will have to await ratification, which could yet take years. It’s not impossible the deal could still unravel.

A regional parliament in one EU country was able to nearly kill Ceta because Europe had deemed the pact to be a so-called mixed agreement, as opposed to an ordinary trade deal. EU trade deals don’t require parliamentary ratification; mixed agreements do. If the EU wants to reach more Ceta-like deals, this precedent was an error. Securing agreement in all the EU’s national (and some of its regional) parliaments will never be easy.

That Ceta almost failed is especially telling, because Canada’s attitude toward regulating business and investment is not that different from Europe’s. If TTIP is ever put to EU parliaments, opposition will be stronger, fueled by antipathy to American-style capitalism.

Enhanced free-trade agreements with other countries—perhaps including Britain, post-Brexit—could also be harder to conclude.

Would it be such a bad thing if these deals didn’t go forward?

Indeed, it would, because promoting international competition in services and investment boosts growth and helps consumers everywhere, lowering costs and raising living standards in the aggregate.

Complementary policies (such as income support and assistance with retraining) are also needed, to help workers who may suffer because of stronger competition. But the worst outcome will be if governments fail in that task and then retreat on trade, which is the emerging trend. That would be as dumb as responding to the labormarket downside of technological progress by throttling innovation.

In some areas, admittedly, tactical flexibility might make sense.

There’s a case for relenting on nonessential provisions that attract particular opposition. Arrangements for resolving disputes between foreign investors and host-country governments are proving especially contentious. Even though the complaints are mostly misguided, international arbitration measures might be more trouble than they’re worth, especially for agreements between countries that have well-functioning legal systems.

The main challenge for the governments involved, though, is to make the case for trade and competition. They should press forward with Ceta, TTIP and the Trans-Pacific Partnership—but they can’t expect to succeed, unless they meet antiglobalist opinion head-on. So far, that’s something they’ve conspicuously failed to do. Bloomberg Editorial Since 2005

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Should we prepare for death?

Susie G. Bugante

All About Social Security

T

he long weekend commemorating All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day was, indeed, a time of celebration, when family members near and far came together to honor the memories of loved ones gone. It was a time of reunion and family bonding spent over plenty of food and kakanin. It was a time of remembering one’s dearly departed and reflecting on one’s mortality. Thinking about death and dying at such a time as this was inevitable.

It used to be taboo to talk about how one wants to be buried when the time comes. Many people these days, however, have become more practical and want better control on how they want to be buried. From the choice of cremation to the clothes to wear, more people are now planning their own funeral. This may sound morbid, but it’s more pragmatic. Oftentimes, part of the preparation is also getting a memorial plan, so that those who are left behind will no longer be financially burdened.

One other way to help ease the burden of a bereaved family is through the Social Security System (SSS). When a member passes away, his beneficiaries become entitled to the death benefit, which is a cash benefit paid either in monthly pension

or lump sum. The monthly pension is granted to the primary beneficiaries of a deceased member who had paid 36 monthly contributions before the semester of death, while the lump-sum amount is granted to the primary beneficiaries of a deceased member who had paid less than 36 monthly contributions before the semester of death. In case of secondary beneficiaries, they are paid a lumpsum benefit only.

The primary beneficiaries are the legitimate dependent spouse, until he/she remarries, and the dependent legitimate, legitimated, or legally adopted and illegitimate children of the member who are not yet 21 or over 21 years old, provided they are incapacitated and incapable of self-support due to

physical or mental disability that is congenital in nature or acquired during minority.

In the absence of primary beneficiaries, the dependent parents are considered the secondary beneficiaries. In their absence, any other person designated by the member in his or her SSS records is considered as the beneficiary. If there is no designated beneficiary, the benefit shall be paid to the deceased member’s legal heirs in accordance with the law of succession under the Family Code of the Philippines.

The monthly pension depends on the member’s paid contributions, including the credited years of service (CYS) and the number of dependent minor children, who should not exceed five. The monthly pension is paid for not less than 60 months.

The primary beneficiaries of a deceased member who had paid less than 36 monthly contributions shall be entitled to lump-sum benefit, which shall be the higher of a) monthly pension multiplied by the number of monthly contributions paid prior to the semester of death; or b) 12 times the monthly pension.

The secondary beneficiaries of the deceased member shall be entitled to a lump-sum benefit equivalent to: a) 36 times the monthly pension—if the member has paid at least 36 monthly contributions prior to the semester of death; or b) monthly pension times the number

Is Japan too scared to succeed?

O

By Michael Schuman | Bloomberg View

f all of the scary economic data that routinely streams out of Japan, this statistic should terrify you: $800 million. That’s the total value of venture capital deals completed in Japan in 2015, according to accounting firm Ernst & Young. Compare that to $72 billion in the US and $49 billion in China. Even tiny Israel managed $2.6 billion in deals.

It’s a staggeringly small figure, and one that explains a great deal about why the world’s third-largest economy continues to struggle, no matter how much cash the central bank pours into it. Too few Japanese are starting new companies.

The reasons for their reluctance are many and complex. For one thing, Japanese seem to be more risk-averse than their peers in other countries. In a 2014 report from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, less than one in three working-age adults in Japan considered starting a company a smart career choice—the second-lowest proportion in the study. That sentiment grows out of a conformist culture that puts a premium on stability and success. Fifty-five percent of potential Japanese entrepreneurs admitted in the same survey that they were afraid of failure, the second-highest rate among the countries studied.

Nor do Japanese youngsters get

enough experience outside the Japanese system, which could stir their entrepreneurial instincts. According to the Institute of International Education, Japanese account for a measly 2 percent of all foreign students enrolled in US universities, behind not only China and South Korea, but Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan. Worse, the ratio has been falling.

Outdated business practices pose additional hurdles. Banks remain overly fixated on receiving collateral for loans—something most startups don’t have. Japan’s fussy bureaucrats make life particularly difficult for entrepreneurs. According to the World Bank’s Doing Business study, Japan ranks a dismal 89th in the ease of starting a company, behind such paragons of efficiency as Afghanistan and Burkina Faso.

The government and financial sector tend to protect established firms.

Japan has a long and sad history of

keeping inefficient “zombie” companies alive with continued financial support and other measures, diverting resources from potentially more productive investments. Research firm Capital Economics figures that the level of government debt guarantees, relative to the size of the economy, is far higher in Japan than in other advanced economies. What all this means is that Japan doesn’t undergo the “creative destruction” necessary to infuse fresh blood into the economy. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reveals that a mere 3.8 percent of Japan’s working-age population is starting a new enterprise or running a company no more than three-and-a-half years old—the lowest ratio among the countries studied, except for Suriname. By comparison, the rate in the US is 13.8 percent. The vast majority of Japanese work in older firms.

Unfortunately, unlike wine, companies don’t necessarily get better with age. A 2014 study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development figured that young firms contribute more to job creation than older ones. Examining all these factors in an August report, Capital Economics concluded that Japan’s “productivity growth is unlikely to be strong enough in coming years to close the gap with the world’s most productive economies.”

of monthly contributions paid or 12 times the monthly pension, whichever is higher—if the member has paid less than 36 monthly contributions prior to the semester of death.

Aside from the death benefit, a funeral grant is given to whoever pays the burial expenses of the deceased member or pensioner. Starting August 1, 2015, the amount of the funeral grant was increased to a variable amount ranging from a minimum of P20,000 to a maximum of P40,000, depending on the member’s paid contributions and CYS. It’s always better to prepare for life’s eventualities, such as death. As the saying goes, the only certainty in life is death. In ancient Rome, memento mori (remember that you are mortal or remember that you have to die) is a constant reminder to victorious conquering generals to keep their feet constantly on the ground. In Christianity, this phrase is a reminder that one can go anytime, thus, one must be spiritually ready at all times and must live a life in accordance with God’s will.

For more details on SSS programs, members can drop by the nearest SSS branch, visit the SSS web site (www.sss.gov.ph), or contact the SSS call center at 920-6446 to 55, which accepts calls from 7 a.m. on Monday all the way to 7 a.m. on Saturday.

Susie G. Bugante is the vice president for public affairs and special events of the SSS. Send comments about this column to susiebugante.bmirror@gmail.com.

Japanese policy-makers can start fixing this problem by streamlining regulation to make it easier to start companies and opening coddled sectors to more competition to spur entrepreneurs. In that regard, the (now troubled) Trans-Pacific Partnership could help.

An overhaul of Japan’s archaic schools would also be a good idea. William Saito, an entrepreneur who encourages young Japanese to follow in his footsteps, has made the case that an exam-obsessed, competition-inducing education system renders Japanese less able to cooperate collegially in teams, a critical factor in any thriving start-up culture. Saito also argues that the Japanese business community requires greater diversity—not just more women, but greater openness to a wider range of ideas—in order to drive innovation.

Japan’s entrepreneur gap gets at a much larger problem. The Bank of Japan can try its utmost to stimulate growth and inflation, but unless inventive, aggressive companies are around to pick up that cheap cash and do something productive with it, policymakers will never be able to jumpstart the economy. The lesson is simple. Before embarking on wild experiments in economic management, get the basics of business right first.

Opinion BusinessMirror

opinion@businessmirror.com.ph

Wednesday, November 2, 2016 A11

Can DENR’s air-pollution The full and prompt payment of premiums measures measure up?

Atty. Dennis B. Funa

Michael Makabenta Alunan

on the contrary

N

ow that it’s the Clean Air month of November, it is timely and about time to measure up the Department of Environment and Natural Resources’s (DENR) air-pollution measures after 17 years of the Clean Air Act—enacted into law on June 23, 1999.

Measure or sure miss? Although

there are many provisions in the law that remain unimplemented, over 95 percent of the DENR’s air-pollution measures have focused solely on the annual acquisition of hundreds of millions of pesos worth of ambient air-monitoring stations.

Unlike measuring pollution directly at source from motor vehicle exhaust pipes and factory smokestacks, measuring pollution in the air needs sophisticated technologies for two reasons, otherwise we are sure to miss what must be measured. One reason is that, unlike many inland continental countries, which have more stagnant air, an archipelagic Philippines experiences regular sea breeze that affects air-pollution concentrations.

In a study done by Emman Anglo, PhD, about a decade ago when he was still with Ateneo University, he noted that air turbulence could radically alter and dilute ambient air measurements.

We can, thus, say this could understate ambient air pollution. Nonetheless, this can be neutralized, if we can do real-time and log in regular patterns and averages. Otherwise, we will miss to measure air pollution for sure.

A second factor is the importance of state-of-the-art technologies. In one clean-air forum about two years ago, it was admitted that most of the airmonitoring stations acquired by the DENR’s Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) have high standard deviation errors of 25 percent, compared to more advanced technologies with 2.5 percent errors. The high 25percent chance of error all the more makes these equipment surely miss their target of measuring accurately.

Favored supplier gets the “bite”? Raising these issues against the DENR for some time now are the Coalition of Clean Air Advocates of the Philippines (CCAAP), led by its Chairman Atty. Leo Olarte, MD, its president Herminio Verano Jr.; activist priest Fr. Roberto Reyes; and Airboard Partner Manny Galvez, who submitted to Environment Secretary Regina Paz L. Lopez on September 9 an assessment of these stations.

It revealed that the same favored supplier, Electro-Byte, who apparently gets the entire “bite” of procurement budgets, has been supplying the same obsolete imported equipment, allegedly phased out already abroad.

Galvez said these Continuous Ambient Air Monitoring System (CAMS) stations are a misnomer, as they cannot measure “continuous” real time.

Electrobyte’s CAMS called Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) only make manual readings at far intervals, with their data allegedly manipulated and computed to acceptable averages. Worse, many of them are not working, he said.

Not contented, E-Byte bites more? In 2003 the first CAMS, about 10 units worth $10 million funded on loan by the Asian Development Bank were procured by DENR-EMB, all of which have not worked.

Unfazed by the dismal experience, EMB ordered in 2006 four more DOAS from Electrobyte, all allegedly failing to deliver consistent and reliable data. By 2010, four more DOAS were procured; and by 2011, PM10 and PM2.5 analyzers, also from Electrobyte, were bought.

In 2013 10 more DOAS were procured, whereby Electrobyte received full payment prior to installation. On the same year, five more DOAS audit equipment were procured to certify that all past DOAS work. Again in 2013 17 more DOAS or CAMS were

purchased for EMB-NCR, but only 14 were finally turned over.

“EMB-NCR inspected the 14 stations and discovered they were not calibrated, could not produce reliable data nor can they do real time.

Being obsolete, they were non-US Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] PM2.5 analyzers,” Galvez said, claiming the findings were shelved by EMB officials. Not contented, again in 2013, Electrobyte supplied 10 more units for installation in other regions, which did not report any data nor were their locations known publicly. ln 2014 a mercury analyzer was procured, but has been lying idle. In 2015 seven more DOAS (CAMS) were again purchased, and Electrobyte allegedly got fully paid prior to installation, despite poor performance, contrary to rules allowing 30 to 60 days tests before acceptance and full payments are made.

In 2015 EMB tried to bid out 37 more DOAS (worth P370 million), while for 2016, it has programmed to procure more analyzers for particulate matter (PM), mercury and black carbon, all totaling P314 million.

All’s not lost, but solution neither found. Galvez said “there is partly good news as we did ‘damage control at our cost’ just to prove the government can do things right. We converted EMB-NCR’s 14 stations into functional units, by installing realtime loggers, but reading at real-time only solves half the problem, at least for NCR’s stations.”

Unfortunately, they still cannot monitor accurately. They need to be calibrated, rehabilitated and upgraded, but EMB has allegedly refused to subject them to scrutiny, for whatever reason, he added. The bigger problem is reading actual pollution levels. It is probably for this reason reports of pollution that is reported daily on TV are positively either “Good” or “Fair”.

This is a total contrast to the findings of the 2015 Manila Aerosol Characterization Experiment (MACE) study conducted by RESCueAIR, the organization of local scientists and researchers, led by Dr. Mylene Cayetano from University of the Philippines and Dr. Edgar Vallar from La Salle, who all unfairly forked out their own personal money, to fund a team and equipment from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) of Leipzig, Germany. One micron “black carbon” taken from Katipunan and Taft Avenue were as much as twice to 4X the levels in Leipzig.

Government sincerity, now put to the test. Government is now put to the test as the feisty Environment Secretary Lopez, who was determined to go headstrong against big mining firms for destructive overmining, is now under watch on whether she will soften this time to an issue, closer to home, involving her top subordinates.

It may be recalled only last month that Undersecretary Leo Jasareno, who headed the DENR’s mining audit team, was sacked by Malacañang, but Lopez declared she wants him back.

With factories moving to the regions and the increasing volume of vehicles and traffic, vehicles as a percentage of total air pollution in Metro Manila has increased from 70 percent two decades back to 88 percent and finally to 92 percent as of 2015. It’s high time government must have solid programs to reduce emissions at source, and not focus solely on measuring pollution in the air. I hope they imbibe my mission, which is “Emission Impossible.”

E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com

INSURANCE FORUM

T

he original provision of Section 72 of the Insurance Act (Act 2427) did not require the full and prompt payment of the premium for an insurance contract to be effective. Thus, even if the premium had not been paid, an insurer was obligated to pay indemnity in case of loss and, correlatively, he had also the right to sue for payment of the premium. This, however, changed on June 20, 1963, when Republic Act (RA) 3540 introduced an amendment to Section 72 by adding the sentence: “No policy issued by an insurance company is valid and binding unless and until the premium thereof has been paid.” This radically changed the legal regime in that unless the premium is paid there is no insurance.

Today, Section 77 of the Amended Insurance Code provides that no contract of insurance is valid and binding unless the premium has been paid. After all, premium has been described as the “elixir vitae” or the elixir of life of the insurance business.

The payment contemplated means full and prompt payment.

Hence, the nonpayment of premiums would result to the lapse and forfeiture of the policies (Valenzuela v. Court of Appeals). Nonpayment of the premiums does not merely suspend but puts an end to an insurance contract. In Constantino v.

Asia Life Insurance Company, it was ruled that even if the nonpayment of premiums was due to the second world war, specifically by reason of the closure of the insurer’s Manila branch office because of the Japanese occupation, the insurance contract should be deemed abrogated by reason of nonpayments, as argued by the so-called United States Rule. In other words, war was no excuse for the nonpayment of premiums. This general rule in Section 77 is what is known as the Cash and Carry rule.

The payment may be made to the insurer or to its agent pursuant to Section 315 (paragraph 2) of the Insurance Code.

The Insurance Code and jurisprudence have, however, stated five exceptions to this general rule: a) in case of a life and or an industrial life policy whenever the grace period applies (Section 77); b) when a 90-day

credit extension is given (Section 77); c) acknowledgement of payment in the policy even if no actual payment has been received (Section 79); d) if the parties have agreed to the payment in installments of the premium and partial payment has been made at the time of loss (Makati Tuscany Condominium v. CA); and e) when estoppel applies (UCPB General Insurance Co. v.

Masagana Telamart Inc. 2001).

Section 77 provides: “An insurer is entitled to payment of the premium as soon as the thing insured is exposed to the peril insured against.

Notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary, no policy or contract of insurance issued by an insurance company is valid and binding unless and until the premium thereof has been paid, except in the case of a life or an industrial life policy whenever the grace period provision applies, or whenever under the broker and agency agreements with duly licensed intermediaries, a 90-day credit extension is given. No credit extension to a duly licensed intermediary should exceed 90 days from date of issuance of the policy.”

Our concern is how far can the exceptions to the general rule go? A source of confusion in the interpretation of Section 77 is the phrase “notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary”. The initial contention is that premiums must be paid in full before any insurance policy becomes valid, and no agreement whatsoever (“notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary”) allowing

a less than full payment shall be acceptable before an insurance policy comes to effect. The Supreme Court en banc has ruled in the 2001 UCPB Gen v. Masagana Telamart that “Section 77 merely precludes the parties from stipulating that the policy is valid even if premiums are not paid, but does not expressly prohibit an agreement granting credit extension, and such an agreement is not contrary to morals, good customs, public order or public policy. So is an understanding to allow insured to pay premiums in installments not so proscribed.” Therefore the application of the phrase “notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary” has been severely narrowed or limited to refer only to any agreement “stipulating that the policy is valid even if premiums are not paid”. Thus, parties can agree as long as it is not contrary to morals, good customs, public order or public policy.

When a 90-day credit extension is given

The Amended Insurance Code amended Section 77 by expressly allowing an additional exception to the general rule by adding the 90-day credit extension given to licensed intermediaries under a broker or agency agreement. Without this express provision, however, the Supreme Court has already added this exception in the case of UCPB v. Masagana (2001). The Court ruled that UCPB Gen had, in fact, granted credit extensions to Masagana; that the grant thereof was a prevalent industry practice, and that it was not against morals, good customs, public order or public policy. Thus, when the fire occurred, the fire policies were renewed by operation of law and were effective and valid, and the premiums were paid within the 90-day credit term. The import of a credit extension was stated in UCPB (2001): “This simply means that if the insurer has granted the insured a credit term for the payment of the premium and loss occurs before the expiration of the term, recovery on the policy should be allowed even though the premium is paid after the loss but within the credit term.”

For historical appreciation, the original provision recognized credit extension. Section 72 of Act 2427, as amended by RA 3540 on June 21,

Why bettors take a flier on Trump

By Leonid Bershidsky Bloomberg View

P

olls are one way of predicting which candidate is leading in a campaign. They’ve been pretty accurate in US presidential elections, though in Europe they’ve often been misleading in recent years and in my country, Russia, they are all but useless.

Gambling is another indicator of public sentiment. You can’t place a legal bet on candidates in the US, but you can in parts of Europe, and there people have put their money on Donald Trump, ignoring his weakness in the polls. At William Hill, the UK’s largest bookmaker, 70 percent of the money is riding on Hillary Clinton—but 65 percent of the individual bets are on Trump. In recent days, the money balance appears to have been shifting, too. On Monday William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe told me, 79.6 percent of the money bet on the US election was for Trump, with 55.2 percent of individual bettors going in his favor.

Sharpe’s explanation is that Trump offers more attractive odds. “If you are going to bet, say, $20 on the outcome and you think Clinton will win, at the moment your $20 will make you a profit of $6.66—you probably won’t think that is an attractive return so won’t play,” Sharpe told me by e-mail. “But should you think Trump will win, your $20 can make you a profit of $50. Hence there are currently more bets for him.”

Serious amounts are being bet on the Republican nominee. The biggest individual bet on Monday was £7,000 (about $8,500). People wouldn’t bank so heavily on Trump if they didn’t think he had a chance. Polls aren’t the only metrics favoring Clinton—most existing econometric models also forecast a Clinton win. Still, here are some serious

and whimsical indicators to give Trump bettors hope. n Social-network engagement and Google searches. “Big data” analysis is an increasingly popular crutch for investors and analysts who don’t fully trust polls. More people are searching for Trump on Google, and “vote Trump” is a far more popular search request than “vote Clinton.” On the USA Today/ Facebook candidate barometer, Trump demonstrates much better Facebook engagement, seen as the combined number of likes, comments, shares and posts.

Most of those who “like” and share posts mentioning Trump could be haters, not backers. Yet, a study of Twitter activity, which uses content analysis, shows that Trump has a consistently better ratio of positive to negative tweets than Clinton. That’s a warning to Clintonites: Brexit supporters dominated the social networks before the UK voted to leave the European Union in June. An artificial-intelligence system that analyzes social network data, built by Shajiv Rai, founder of the Indian start-up Genic.ai, in 2004, predicts a victory for Trump.

It accurately called the last three US presidential elections. n Economic indicators. Several econometric models that predict electoral outcomes based on the incumbent party’s economic performance forecast a change of ruling party this year. Alan Abramovitz of the University of Virginia, whose model has accurately called the popular-vote winners since 1988, gives Clinton 48.6 percent of the two-party vote (with the caveat that Trump’s personality may well move the needle in the Democrat’s favor). A 2009 model by Yale’s Ray Fair reflects the relationship between economic indicators (output growth and inflation) and votes cast for the incumbent party’s candidate. This model has consistently predicted a loss

for the Democrats this year. As of October 28, Fair’s model gives Clinton 44 percent of the vote in a two-way race.

In 2012 Fair’s equation gave Obama 49 percent; he ended up with 51 percent, within the model’s 2.5-percentage-point margin of error. If Clinton wins, it will be the first time the model will prove inaccurate. Unemployment dynamics and the ISM Manufacturing index, which have been good predictors of election outcomes, also give an advantage to Trump as the change candidate. n Consumer confidence. The measure for October of the presidential election year has long been highly predictive of the outcome of the race, as Mitsubishi Bank Vice President Michael Nemira argued in a 1992 paper. Nemira used a simple formula involving the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment that has only failed in 2000 (when the incumbent party’s candidate did win the popular vote but still lost the election) and in 2012 (when one could argue that consumer confidence hadn’t recovered after the 2008 financial crisis).

This year the formula predicts a loss for Democrats. There’s another, even simpler way to use consumer confidence to predict presidential race outcomes. Since 1968, the incumbent party has won nine of the 12 elections when the Consumer Confidence Index was above 100. The exceptions were 2012, 2000 and 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson decided to forego a reelection bid amid turmoil over the Vietnam War. It stands at 98.6 now, predicting a victory for the Republican nominee. n The fiscal model. Based on the observation that growing federal spending relative to the gross domestic product reduces the incumbent party’s chances of winning, it failed to predict Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012. Its author, Alfred Cuzan of the University of

1963, read: “An insurer is entitled to payment of premium as soon as the thing insured is exposed to the peril insured against, unless there is clear agreement to grant the insured credit extension of the premium due. No policy issued by an insurance company is valid and binding unless and until the premium thereof has been paid.”

This provision on credit extension, granted in 1963, was removed

by Presidential Decree 612 (Insurance Code) on December 18, 1974, following abuses committed by insurance agents in withholding premiums collected. The Finance Journal of the Department of Finance cited the rationale: “No policy or contract of insurance issued by an insurance company should be valid unless the premium therefore has been paid. In other words, there shall no longer be any extension of credit with respect to insurance premiums. It seems that most of the cases of misappropriation of premium collections committed by insurance agents arise from the fact that the agent is usually given the opportunity to hold the premium collections during the period covered by the credit extension.” Notwithstanding this express deletion, the Court in UCPB (2001) ruled that it is a valid agreement. Under the 2013 amendment, this has been expressly reinstated. The concern over agents’ misappropriation of premiums will have to be addressed through other means.

Where the parties agreed to installment payment and partial payment was made

Where the policy requires the payment of premium in full, and where the premium has only been partially paid and the balance paid only after the peril insured against has occurred, the insurance contract did not take effect and the insured cannot collect at all on the policy. Where the full payment of the premium was not a condition precedent to the existence of the contract, the partial payment of the premium made the policy effective and the insurer may commence action against the insured for the unpaid balance on the policy.

Dennis B. Funa is currently the deputy insurance commissioner for Legal Services of the Insurance Commission. E-mail: dennisfuna@yahoo.com.

West Florida, has since adjusted it. The model predicts a loss for the Democrats, with 48.2 percent of the two-party vote. n Helmut Norpoth’s models. The SUNY at Stony Brook professor has two.

One is based on the candidates’ primary performance: The one who does better in his party’s early primaries wins the election. This has been true in every election since 1912 except the 1960 one. The model predicts a strong likelihood of a Trump win. The other one, based on the view that “like sunspots, elections run in cycles”—an approach to politics reminiscent of the technical analysis traders use—projects a victory for Trump with 51.4 percent of the popular vote. Norpoth is on record as saying that polls are “bunk” because they are about opinions, not actions. He is convinced Trump is headed for victory and has bet on him on the Iowa prediction markets. n Allan Lichtman’s “13 Keys to the White House.” The American University professor’s previously accurate approach is also largely based on the outgoing administration’s performance.

Of the 13 indicators, including the state of the national economy, social unrest, scandals, the incumbent’s foreign-policy success and both top candidates’ charisma, five should point in the challenger’s favor for him to win. Lichtman predicts a Trump victory. n ISideWith.com. Since September, 2016, this site has offered a questionnaire allowing users to check their positions against those of the presidential candidates. More than 275,000 have done so, thus far; according to the resulting data, Trump should carry 41 US states. If the issues were at the forefront of this campaign and people actually voted for the candidate with whom they mostly agree, Trump would win, according to this large but unrepresentative sample.

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Wednesday, November 2, 2016

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Stakeholders ‘mourn’ death of DOT site

By Ma. Stella F. Arnaldo

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destinations. The TPB, formerly the Philippine Conventions and Visitors Bureau, is the marketing arm of the DOT. This was not the first time the TPB had allowed tourism web sites to go dead. During the recent Travel and Bloggers Exchange (Tbex) Asia Pacific 2016 in Manila from October 13 to 16, TPB’s own web site was not accessible to anyone who wanted to know about the Tbex event and other activities meant to promote the Philippines.

TPB officials themselves have been pushing social media and online engagement as a way to spread the word about the Philippines faster and encourage more foreign tourists to visit.

International tourist arrivals posted a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.77 percent from 2010 to 2015, higher than the 7.76-percent CAGR achieved in nine years from 2001 to 2010. International tourist receipts also showed a dramatic increase from P112.55 billion in 2010 to P227.62 billion in 2015.

@akosistellaBM Special to the BusinessMirror

S the nation went into mourning to remember their dear departed loved ones for the long Halloween/All Saints’ Day break, tourism stakeholders over the weekend lamented the “death” of the Department of Tourism (DOT) web site.

The site, www.itsmorefuninthephilippines.com, set up in 2012 as a cover site to the DOT’s main page, shows any inquiring tourist where to go and what activities they can engage in when they want travel to the Philippines.

However, since October 28, the screen of the site read: “This account has been suspended. Contact your hosting provider for more information.” Information-technology experts say when a web-site account is suspended, this usually means the site owner has not paid for the hosting services of the host server.

Aileen Clemente, vice president of the Tourism Congress of the Philippines, told the BusinessMirror: “As far as the Web page is concerned, if this was someone’s error, that’s a big responsibility to let slide. If it is intentional, where else can anyone get information should they need to research about Philippine tourism?”

She pointed out that “it’s already one of the biggest concerns of the stakeholders

and those who want to sell the Philippines that there is lack of information.” Clemente is also president of Rajah Travel Corp. and a columnist of the BusinessMirror.

Checked today, the DOT web site now says the “it’s more fun” server can no longer be found.

Asked to comment, DOT Assistant Secretary for Tourism Development Rolando Cañizal said: “I am not privy to said account [www.itsmorefuninthephilippines.com]. We only handle the www.tourism.gov.ph site,” and referred this reporter to Nedalin Miranda, Tourism Promotions Board (TPB) officer-in-charge for the Marketing Communications Department and Brand Management and Advertising Division, for her input.

Despite several tries, Miranda could not be reached for comment as of press time.

Prior to the suspension of the web site, DOT’s own statistics page embedded as a download tab on the main agency page could no longer be accessed by the media

If any tourist wants to find out what he can do and what is the best place to go on a holiday in the Philippines, this is the site that will greet them when he tries to access the Department of Tourism web site.

and the public. Access was only restored after a day of repeated reports to the DOT’s statistics team.

However, because of the current suspension of the “it’s more fun” web site, access to the official DOT page (www.tourism.gov. ph), which includes arrivals statistics, media

releases, bidding announcements, and a list of agency officials and contact numbers, is no longer possible.

DOT insiders explained that TPB was asked to handle the “It’s More Fun…” cover web site because it was meant to be a marketing and promotions site for Philippine

If it is intentional, where else can anyone get information should they need to research about Philippine tourism?”

—Clemente

CHINA CONFIRMS ALLOWING FILIPINO FISHERMEN ACCESS TO DISPUTED SHOAL

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hina’s Foreign Ministry confirmed a decision to allow Filipino fishermen access to a disputed shoal following a visit to Beijing by the President Duterte.

Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hua Chunying said Beijing made “proper arrangements” regarding Scarborough Shoal after Duterte expressed concern about the matter.

China seized the shoal, located 228 kilometers (123 nautical miles) from the northern Philippines, following a 2012 standoff between the sides, preventing Filipino fishermen from working in the area.

Chinese coast-guard ships sometimes used water cannons to drive off Filipino fishermen, while protecting Chinese boats.

However, fishermen said over the weekend that the Chinese coast guard had allowed them to again fish in the area following Duterte’s recent visit, which officials say resulted in a warming of bilateral ties.

The visit marked a “comprehensive improvement of ChinaPhilippines relations. Given the circumstance, regarding the issue President Duterte was highly concerned about, China made proper arrangements on the issue based on the friendship between China and the Philippines,” Hua told reporters at a daily briefing.

Hua made it clear that China would continue to exercise administration over the area as Chinese territory. Defense Secretary Delfin N. Lorenzana said on Sunday a navy plane had spotted at least four Chinese coast guard ships around the shoal during a surveillance flight on Saturday.

Duterte’s National Security Adviser Hermogenes C. Esperon Jr., said there was no agreement between China and the Philippines on the return of Filipino fishermen to the Scarborough Shoal. The Philippine government, he said, would

continue to assert its claim over the traditional fishing area.

“There was no expressed agreement but it seems like the traditional rights of our fishermen are being respected,” Esperon told reporters in Manila. “But the president reiterated that we won in the court, the other leader also reiterated that is historically their territory.”

“Now that there’s no resolution, why allow yourselves to be in that confrontational position when you can talk about economic relations, trade relations?” Esperon said, adding that the Philippines would continue to press its claim.

“Maybe not now but when we go to another round of talks, we will again assert it,” Esperon said.

Farther south, in the Spratly Islands, China has in recent years constructed islands by piling sand and concrete atop coral reefs, despite protests from other claimants and the United States. AP

Subsidy crunch slashes clean energy funding in top markets

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he green-energy industry is starting to feel the impact of an efficiency drive sweeping Asia, where governments from China to Japan are scaling back subsidies to constrain a boom in installations.

Investment in clean-power technologies in Asia slumped 41 percent to $70.1 billion in the first nine months of the year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), which hosts a conference on the issue in Shanghai starting on Tuesday. It’s the first decline in the modern history of an industry that’s barely a decade old. The ability of those plants to produce electricity is on track to surge 13 percent, the research group said.

The findings underscore the concern of authorities about their ability to integrate a burgeoning number of wind and solar farms, which have strained the capacity

of electricity grids. Officials are getting smarter about how they stimulate the industry, threatening to slow growth in what has been some of the biggest markets for manufacturers from Trina Solar Ltd. to Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology Co. A drop in investment “doesn’t mean that the industry is declining,” said Justin Wu, head of Asia and Pacific for BNEF in Hong Kong. “It is self-correcting. Renewables have to be built efficiently and used more efficiently. Solar is becoming cheaper, and there is more efficient build.”

In China the world’s biggest market for the technology, subsidies were recalibrated at the end of last year because electricity demand stagnated and grid authorities struggled to keep up with the number of new wind and solar farms seeking connections. Those factors reduced the need for new renewable-energy

capacity, giving the government the upper hand in negotiations over the price it will allow for power purchase agreements.

Japan had a similar experience.

The second-biggest market for solar in recent years has cut support for renewables to give utilities more time to integrate the variable flows of electricity from photovoltaics— and to take advantage of lower costs.

The result was that worldwide, clean energy investment fell to its lowest in three years in the third quarter, according to BNEF data.

Those trends help explain why clean energy shares have underper for med the broader stock market so far this year even as companies reported record sales.

The WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index has fallen 5.7 percent this year while the MSCI World Index has advanced 2.7 percent. Bloomberg News