Businessmirror october 12, 2016

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Wednesday, October 12, 2016 Vol. 11 No. 368

CUA SAYS OFFSETTING MEASURES AMONG PROVISIONS TO BE REVISED

House, DOF set to tweak PIT bill

INSIDE

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₧25,000 The salary level of workers that President Duterte wants to exempt from income tax

Liberal Party Rep. Dakila Carlo E. Cua of Quirino province, chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, See “PIT bill,” A2

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heritage as a selling point in the leisure business

property

@joveemarie

eaders of the House of Representatives and the Department of Finance (DOF) will start fine-tuning the first package of the Duterte administration’s taxreform initiative, with the hope of fixing what Speaker Pantaleon D. Alvarez earlier labeled as “antipoor provisions”.

a vacation home in a popular beach haven

property

By Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz

DU30’s first 100 days: Citizens note changes E2

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Two burials, one death Free fire

I

N the 1992 presidential campaign, I was for Mitra.

The Mitra campaign had so much money, I carried an empty cardboard box to pretend I carried some, too.

Someone said money has no smell. That guy knew nothing about money. Money smells of victory in the morning. Cory Aquino wasn’t smelling much of it. We had lured her finance people into our camp. We had a stranglehold on her candidate’s financing. One day, I handed her a speech draft.

Continued on A11

no need to say ‘allo’ to google’s new chat app

Russians, Saudis pledge to limit oil production

S

Life

d1 A Filipino family listens to President Duterte’s first State of the Nation Address during a rally near the gates of the House of Representatives in Quezon City on July 25. AP/Aaron Favila

On writing great big books

By Mia Rosienna Mallari Correspondent

pages

Teddy Locsin Jr.

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D4

Conclusion

MUS, C av ite — Sa ndw iched bet ween t wo houses on a near-empty lot here is a place that never sleeps. Its operator, however, does but had sleepless nights after Rodrigo R. Duterte became president.

The place is called Tapsi-Kret, a local eatery serving tapa, egg and fried rice, a dish that has become synonymous with the place for its customers, mostly citizens of Imus, for the past two decades. Born when Troy and Noralyn Lim were still a couple, Tapsi-Kret’s original location was through a narrow series of houses built from rough-cut wood and scrap-metal awnings. On its new location, almost in the middle

of nowhere, the restaurant sports columns from thick bamboo and covered by roof made of the indigenous nipa grass.

Modern jazz music plays on black speaker.

A year after settling in the new location, Lim said he noticed the g row ing number of customers dining out before dawn—coincidentally after Mr. Duterte settled Continued on A2

Neda bats for passage of economic bills T he Nat ion a l E conom ic and Development Authority (Neda) on Tuesday pushed for the passage of several economic measures during the 17th Congress to spur rural development and the growth of local industries.

Neda Deputy Director General Rosemarie G. Edillon said the agency’s legislative agenda is aimed at promoting the industry and services sectors, agriculture and fisheries sectors, environment and natural resources, social protection, shelter

security, health and nutrition, and education and skills enhancement.

Edillon presented the agency’s legislative agenda during the organizational meeting of the House Committee on Economic Affairs on Tuesday.

To boost the growth of the industry and services sectors, the Neda called on Congress to amend the Export Development Act; remove restrictions on the foreign investment negative list (FINL) of the Foreign Investments Act; and to liberalize

PESO exchange rates n US 48.2800

EDILLON: “Reforming the NFA aims to decouple the regulatory and proprietary functions of the agency.”

investment areas, including those provided in the 1987 Constitution.

The Neda said rationalizing fiscal incentives, amending the charter of

the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Anti-Money Laundering Act and rationalizing the mining fiscal regime would further improve the competitiveness of the Philippines.

Edillon said the proposed amendments to the Export Development Act (EDA) of 1994 seek to make the country’s business environment more supportive of trade, in light of recent developments in the global market, such as the weakening of traditional export markets, and the See “Neda,” A2

audi Arabia and Russia, the world’s two largest crude-oil producers, said they’re ready to cooperate to limit output, helping send prices to a one-year high in London.

Russia is willing to join efforts of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) to stabilize the market, which would require either a freeze or a cut, President Vladimir Putin said on Monday at the World Energy Congress in Istanbul. Many producers outside the group have expressed a willingness to cooperate on output caps, said Saudi Arabia’s Energy and Industry Minister Khalid AlFalih, who added that he was “optimistic” there’ll be a deal that could lift prices as high as $60 by year-end.

Coordinated output curbs

by Russia and the Opec, who together pump about half the world’s oil, could boost fuel prices for consumers and revive the fortunes of a battered energy industry. While Putin’s comments are the firmest indication yet that such an agreement is possible, Russia is still pumping at record levels, and has stopped short of a commitment to pull back. Opec members also have many hurdles to overcome before implementing their first cuts in eight years.

“It’s a little bit early to start celebrating an agreement,” Tord André Lien, Norway’s petroleum and energy minister, said in an interview with Bloomberg T V on Monday.

“They have made great progress, and this could end up in an agreement that will materialize around Christmas and the first quarter of next year.”

Surprise deal

Ministers from some of the largest oil-producing nations are gathering in Turkey this week to discuss ways to end a two-year supply glut. With benchmark Brent crude trading at about $53 a barrel—less than half its price in mid-2014 —countries including Saudi Arabia remain under severe economic pressure, prompting last month’s surprise reversal of its policy of pumping without constraints.

Opec agreed in principle on September 28 in Algiers to limit output to a range of 32.5 million to 33 million barrels a day, compared with production last month of about 33.75 million. While the deal has helped lift crude prices by about 15 percent, precise details of who would make the cuts or whether producers outside the group would join weren’t finalized.

An Opec committee will work on the details of how to share the burden of cuts and present its proposals at a formal November 30 meeting in Vienna. Ministers from some group members, including Saudi Arabia and Algeria, will meet with non-Opec nations, including Russia and Azerbaijan, in Istanbul today to discuss wider cooperation.

Russian cooperation

“Russia is ready to join in joint measures to limit output and calls on other oil exporters to do the same,” Putin said. “In the current situation, we think that a freeze or even a cut in oil production is probably the only proper decision to preserve stability in the global energy market.”

See “Oil production,” A12

n japan 0.4661 n UK 59.7127 n HK 6.2231 n CHINA 7.2013 n singapore 35.1204 n australia 36.7218 n EU 53.7791 n SAUDI arabia 12.8713

Source: BSP (11 October 2016 )

A2 Wednesday, October 12, 2016

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DU30’s first 100 days: Citizens note changes Continued from A1

into his presidency.

“Bago umupo si Duterte, halos kakabukas lang naman din namin dito. Sobrang konti lang ng customers sa madaling araw. Pero ngayon halata na lumalakas na,” Lim told the BusinessMirror. “’Yung kita ng umaga nilalagay pa sa madaling araw para ma-sustain ’yun. Ngayon kaya niya na on its own [It was only days after we opened before Mr. Duterte formally became president.

Customers at dawn were very few.

Now the number of customers is increasing. Before, what we earned in the morning we still use for the dawn operations. Now, the restaurant earns on its own].”

Security

ROUND-The-Clock entrepreneurs like Lim have been banking on the perspective toward security that Mr. Duterte’s war on drugs has embedded in some minds. Lim noted that the elimination of druginduced personalities may have an effect on 24/7 businesses like his.

“Sa tingin ko mas okay naman na ganoon ang mind-set nila,” pertaining to

Neda. . .

his customers [I think that our customers’ mindset of feeling safe even after midnight benefits our business].”

Lim’s reliance on his customer’s sense they are safe inside the restaurant is uncanny since Tapsi Kret doesn’t have a security guard.

He said in the nearly 20 years of their operation, they have never been burglarized. Hence, he says he has not felt or noticed changes in the 100 days of Mr. Duterte’s presidency.

“Mentalidad lang ng tao ’yan,” Lim said, referring to personal disposition on the sense of security.

“Meron akong kakilala na tagaManila na kapag pinapupunta ko dito, alanganin siya kasi nag-mo-motor siya. Sabi kasi baka mapag-kamalan siya, although hindi naman siya user, hindi naman siya adik pero may fear na kasi. Usually kapag nagpupunta siya ginagabi or inaabot siya ng madaling araw [I have an acquaintance who lives in Manila rides a motorcycle and esitates every time I ask him to go here and check out our place. He said authorities might mistake him for a drug user or addict, which he’s not. He’s become paranoid. Usually, if he goes here,

Continued from A1

emergence of free-trade agreements and other regional economic-integration initiatives that have led to stiffer competition in the global market.

She added that the rationalization of incentives seeks to harmonize the various investment incentives laws, address the weak monitoring system of incentives, and plug the leak in government revenues.

“The rationalization of incentives will be necessary in light of the move to propose a comprehensive tax reform package to Congress,” Edilllon said.

With the government aiming to attract more foreign investments into the country, the Neda official said removing or reducing the limitations on foreign investments or participation in certain activities as provided for in the Constitution and specific laws is “necessary”.

The Neda also backed an omnibus bill that will amend specific laws limiting foreign participation in investment activities/areas,

he stays up to midnight or dawn],” Lim added.

Luck

BUT Lim is not leaving security to sheer luck.

Again, he refers to mentalidad, saying the location of the store near the barangay hall or village officials’ center may have deterred criminals.

Still, he has plans to strategically put a projector that would play a movie on the two-story brick wall of an adjacent house to further deter burglars.

Lim said he would continue to rely on his neighbors, as well as customers—when full, the restaurant seats 50—as deterrent.

Since the place also has a strong Internet connection, Lim said a criminal may have second thoughts on plans to stage a robbery of Tapsi Kret, even after Mr. Duterte steps down in 2022.

Good news

MR. Duterte raked in votes last national elections in Cavite, garnering 41.2 percent of the half-a-million votes in the province. Running

except those provided in the Constitution.

The bill seeks to open to foreigners retail trade enterprises with a paid-up capital of less than $2.5 million; culture, production, milling, processing, except retailing, of rice and corn; contracts for the construction and repair of locally funded public works; and contracts for the supply of materials, goods and commodities to government-owned or -controlled corporation, company, agency or municipal corporation.

To improve governance, the Neda is pushing for the passage of key measures, such as the proposed Government Efficiency Office Act, Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, the Public Financial Management bill, full implementation of the Integrated Financial Management Information Systems, the Bangsamoro basic law, Salary Standardization Law IV, and the comprehensive tax-reform law.

“The Government Efficiency Office Act, which will set policy-making principles and guidelines to be followed by all

behind the then-mayor of Davao, Sen. Grace Poe had barely kept up with 22 percent.

Generally, Caviteños are known as brash fighters even way back the Spanish era, which may be a probable reason the majority of the province opted for a Duterteled presidency.

Rebecca Velasquez, editor and publisher of the weekly newspaper Pulso ng Makabagong Caviteño, choose to shy away from publishing stories about the President’s war on drugs. This is despite the newsworthiness of the war: alleged drug users and pushers found dead, men in uniform covering drug activity in the province and the like.

“We are a developmental paper,” Velasquez said in Filipino, “We publish developmental news in Cavite, I don’t publish all those deaths, the negative news.”

In July over 700 drug users and pushers surrendered to authorities in the town of Rosario. After 100 days of Duterte’s presidency, over 100 drug-related deaths have been reported in the region.

In September 40 police officers were placed under investigation for

government agencies, to ensure efficiency across government agencies—Senate Bill 348 has been filed on this. [A] Freedom of Information Act [is still needed] because Executive Order 2 covers only the Executive branch and needs to be expanded to cover other government agencies,” Edillon told the committee.

For the agriculture and fisheries sectors and environment and natural resources, Edillon said the Neda is asking the House of Representatives to pass measures reforming the National Food Authority (NFA) and the amendment to the Agricultural Tariffication Act of 1996, or Republic Act (RA) 8178.

Other measures for boosting the agriculture and fisheries sectors that the Neda wants to be enacted include the extension of the Issuance of Notice of Coverage (NOC) for the Land Acquisition and Distribution, Delineation of the Specific Forest Limits of the Public Domain (Final Forest Limits Act) and the Mining Industry Coordinating Council’s (MICC) proposed bill on fiscal regime and revenue-sharing scheme.

their alleged involvement in the illegal-drugs trade in Cavite.

Velasquez emphasized that positive news in the community, even at a national level, doesn’t merit attention. She said the aversion to “good news” comes as media report on bodies piling up nearly every day.

Fear factor

BEING in the commercial printing business since 1985, Velazquez describes the “changes” under the Duterte presidency as “sudden.”

Her regular clients and ordinary employees reflect the segmented views of society in general, she said.

“Doon sa side ng mga nag-nenegosyo, may business, mas kampante sila,” Velasquez said. “Pero pagdating dun sa side ng mga ordinaryong tao, ay parang takot sila kasi baka biglang may babaril, may papatay.

Bukas o makalawa baka kamag-anak mo yung namatay. Basta namatay na lang [Those who do business have a sense of security. But for ordinary people, their fear has heightened, worried that gunfire can ensue any time. Maybe tomorrow or the next day, they fear relatives would be the ones killed].”

“Reforming the NFA aims to decouple the regulatory and proprietary functions of the agency. Amendment to the Agricultural Tariffication Act of 1996. With the expiration of the QR on rice in June 2017 under the WTO, there is a need to amend RA 8178 to remove rice exemption from tariff,” she said.

Edillon said the NOC bill will allow the Department of Agrarian Reform to continue the issuance of NOCs and to accept the Voluntary Offer to Sell, which expired on June 30, 2014.

As for the MICC’s proposed bill, the Neda said the council provided a “simple computation” by setting a fixed government share instead of assigning different rates for several mining taxes, royalties and fees.

Among the measures for social protection and shelter security that the Neda wants Congress to enact include the proposed Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program Act; SSS Reform Act of 2016; and the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz

Good things

WHILE she was not part of the 41 percent who voted for Duterte, Velasquez had good things to say about the performance of the President for his first 100 days in office.

Having been born in 1960, she has seen the rise and fall of eight presidents. For her, Mr. Duterte has been the most efficient to date.

“I can say that ’yung first 100 days ni Duterte ang pinaka best na naipakita ng Presidente ng Pilipinas.

Eto ’yung may mulat na ako,” Velasquez said. “Dito nagpakita siya ng paninindigan, na wala siyang takot sa kung ano man, kaysa labas ’yan o sa loob ng bansa.”

The mother of four said she considers the President as a man of action.

However, she considers herself one of those who thinks the president should also slow down and take a step back before firing his often sharp words.

But whether Mr. Duterte would do so—slow down in word or in deed—has yet to be seen in the next 100 days.

And Lim and Velasquez would surely be watching.

PIT bill. . .

Continued from A1

said on Tuesday a meeting was set with the DOF this week to tackle the controversial provisions of the agency’s first tranche of the Comprehensive Tax Reform Package, which seeks to lower personal income tax (PIT).

This is after the House leaders deemed it proper to just introduce revisions to the DOF proposal, instead of totally junking the entire package. “Basically, we will talk—on Wednesday or on Thursday this week—about some provisions in the DOF bill, like the imposition of the excise tax on petroleum and removal of VAT [value-added tax] exemptions for senior citizens and persons with disabilities [PWDs],” Cua told reporters.

The imposition of excise tax on petroleum and removal of VAT exemptions for senior citizens and PWDs are among the offsetting measures being pushed by the DOF to recover the estimated P159 billion that will be lost due to the planned adjustments in the PIT rates.

Cua said the House will introduce “improvements” to the DOF proposal. One of these improvements is the inclusion of a provision on tax-collection efficiency of revenuegenerating agencies.

Earlier, Alvarez said the lower chamber and President Duterte want to exempt workers earning P25,000 monthly—or P300,000 annually—and below from the PIT. But this runs counter to the DOF proposal that seeks to exempt from PIT only workers with a monthly salary of P20,833, or about P250,000 annually. Cua said he believes the issue will be resolved in a meeting between the Lower House and the DOF. Despite conflicting views between the lawmakers and the DOF, Cua said his committee is eyeing to pass the bill lowering the PIT and its offsetting measures by December. Cua also believes the bill would be approved during a plenary session in January next year.

In the current setup, those earning P10,000 or less per month pay a 5-percent income tax, while those with yearly earnings of P500,000 and above pay a 32-percent income tax.

The DOF bill seeks to expand the VAT base by reducing the coverage of its exemptions, including privileges granted to senior citizens and PWDs, and through adjustment of excise taxes imposed on petroleum products.

Likewise, the DOF proposes to restructure the excise tax on automobiles, except for buses, trucks, cargo vans, jeeps, jeepney substitutes and special purpose vehicles to cover losses in tax revenues.

The bill also seeks to repeal Section 4 of the Expanded Senior Citizens Act of 2010, as well as Sections 32-A and 33-A of the Magna Carta for PWDs. Section 4 of the Esca provides senior citizens VAT exemptions for medicines, professional fees of attending physicians in all private hospitals, land mass transit, airfare, seafare and utilization of services in hotels; admission fees in theater and cinema houses and funeral and burial services for the death of senior citizens.

Sections 32-A and Section 32-B of the Magna Carta for PWDs provide for a 20-percent discount and exemption from VAT, if applicable, on certain goods and services as tax incentives to a family of a PWD.

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A4 Wednesday, October 12, 2016

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40 airlines protest Naia’s quarantine rules vs Zika

A

By Recto L. Mercene

@rectomercene

LL 40 air carriers flying out of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) are up in arms against the seeming strongarm tactics by the airport’s Bureau of Quarantine (BOQ), requiring airlines to use a certain kind of insecticide against the Zika virus every time an airplane lands at the premier airport.

“The members of the Airline Operators Council [AOC] are issued World Health Organization [WHO] certified insecticide and we spray our aircraft before landing,” said a member who requested anonymity because they need approval from headquarters abroad to issue statements.

The AOC members are one in saying the airport quarantine had told them to buy a WHO-certified insecticide from them at P385 per canister.

“The AOC has more than 200 airplanes flying out of the Naia and a combined total of more than 500 counting Philippine Airlines, Cebu Pacific, Zest Air and AirAsia, and with an average of three canisters per airplane. That’s a lot of money.”

The AOC members said opening the passenger cabin and the cargo compartment after landing would have allowed Zika-carrying mosquitoes and virus to escape and, therefore, fumigation would be useless. “’Pag nabuksan ang cabin at cargo pagdating ng eroplano, ’di singaw na. Bakit pa eespreyan,” they said. “The AOC will appeal this directive

WHO sees further rise of Zika cases in Asia-Pacific region

from the Bureau of Quarantine.”

Dr. Gerry Camba, Naia quarantine doctor, issued a memorandum, saying every aircraft passenger cabin and cargo hold must be sprayed with 2-percent d-phenothrin and 2-percent permethrin upon arrival at the airport and prior to the cargo being unloaded.

He said airline personnel must submit the canisters they used as proof they fumigated the aircraft upon arriving at the Naia.

By the BOQ’s memorandum, every aircraft must be sprayed with the Zika-killing insecticide from WHO-recommended spray upon arrival at the airport and prior to the cargo’s being unloaded.

WHO has declared the spread of the Zika virus as an international public-health emergency. The number of cans of insecticide will be determined by the type of aircraft: A Boeing A747-400 needs 400 grams, or four cans, while a B737 needs only one can, the BOQ said.

Should an airline fail to comply, the BOQ will spray the aircraft and charge the airline a fee of P375 per can.

IN this September 14 photo, a worker from the Ministry of Health sprays mosquito insecticide fog in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a day after two new Zika virus infection cases were detected in the country. The US health officials are advising pregnant women to postpone travel to 11 countries in Southeast Asia because of Zika outbreaks in the region. The advisory targets travel to Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Z

ika infections are expected to continue rising in the Asia-Pacific region, where authorities are increasing surveillance, preparing responses to complications and collaborating on information about the disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

Complicating the fight against the virus, spread by mosquitoes, is the lack of a “foolproof” approach to mosquito control, as shown by decades of efforts to contain dengue virus, WHO Director General Margaret Chan said in her address to a Western Pacific regional meeting of the world health body.

She said other questions included why the first signs of the virus’s existence in the Asia-Pacific region came from travelers whose infections were

confirmed once they returned home.

“Is this weak surveillance an indication of population-wide immunity, or proof that the virus has somehow acquired greater epidemic potential?” she asked.

Zika symptoms are mild and no deaths have been reported globally, said Dr. Li Ailan, director for health security and emergencies at WHO’s Western Pacific regional office. But she said based on WHO’s risk assessment, Zika viral infection will continue to spread in the region and authorities are preparing for complications.

The complications include like microcephaly and Guillain-Barre syndrome. Babies born to Zikainfected mothers have been found to have microcephaly, or a birth defect where the head is abnor-

mally small and brains might not have developed properly. GuillainBarre syndrome is a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks part of the peripheral nervous system. The Western Pacific region is the second most Zika-affected region in the world, Li said.

Nineteen of its 27 countries have reported Zika cases since 2007 and 13 of them this year.

Dr. Shin Young-soo, WHO’s Western Pacific regional head, said they are working very hard to increase surveillance and detection of Zika, and long-term response to the disease are among the topics to be discussed at the five-day conference. Those include detecting cases and reducing mosquito density, especially in high-risk locations, Li said. AP

PHL-China ties to improve with Duterte visit–Palace

By David Cagahastian @davecaga

M

alacañang on Tuesday said the government expects bigger volume of bilateral trade between China and the Philippines, and more soft loans for infrastructure, when President Duterte makes an official visit there next week.

This, as Mr. Duterte himself expressed his belief that China is sincere in helping the Philippines with its funding needs for infrastructure projects.

Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said among the issues expected to be brought up by President Duterte in his visit to China next week are better bilateral trade and the Philippines’s rights over the West Philippine Sea. “Our expectations are that the doors will be more open for our trading relations with China and for other opportunities from which we can benefit from China. There are many opportunities, such as infrastructure projects and railway projects, which they can do and provide as help to our country,” Andanar said.

He added there would be some discussion about the rights of the Philippines over the West Philippine Sea, which could be a touchy issue,

Our expectations are that the doors will be more open for our trading relations with China and for other opportunities from which we can benefit from China. There are many opportunities, such as infrastructure projects and railway projects, which they can do and provide as help to our country.”—Andanar

but which could not be done away with altogether, since the Philippines has obtained an arbitration ruling in its favor from the United Nations’ Permanent Court of Arbitration.

Meanwhile, in a speech in Basilan on Monday night, Mr. Duterte said he expects China to allow Filipino fishermen to fish again in the disputed territories in the West Philippine Sea, as he expressed his belief that China is sincere in helping the Philippines.

“I have a gut feel that we are okay to them. Let’s not put in issue yet the Scarborough because we are not yet capable. Even if we get angry, it would just be hot air. So let’s talk with them first. I’ll tell them to let our Filipino brothers fish there then

we can talk,” President Duterte said in a speech in Basilan.

He cited the Chinese government’s recent lifting of import restrictions against Philippine bananas and pineapples as a sign of goodwill. “I have a gut feel that they really want to help. If I can secure their commitment to help, I would send it right away here. I will send the secretary of health here to upgrade your hospital, or I’ll do it myself,” he said.

He added that he’s looking to secure bilateral soft loans from China which have long maturities, low interest rates and could be renegotiated in the future based on the government’s capacity to pay.

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AseanWednesday BusinessMirror

Editor: Max V. de Leon • Wednesday, October 12, 2016 A5

Indrawati builds social pact with Indonesians Singapore seen holding monetary policy steady

S

ingapore’s central bank will probably refrain from easing policy when it meets this week, saving its ammunition for next year as the city-state’s economic outlook deteriorates.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which uses the currency rather than interest rates to manage the economy, will maintain its current policy settings, according to 21 of 23 economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

The central bank eased twice in 2015 and again at the first of this year’s two scheduled meetings in April, when it shifted to a neutral stance of zero appreciation for the local dollar.

Growth and inflation in the export-oriented nation haven’t slowed enough to justify further action, according to Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. (RBS). The MAS is set to reserve its firepower for next year, when the city is likely to feel more pain from China’s slowdown and the slump in oil prices that has hurt the local marine and offshore industry.

“We’re not in a recession right now, but that might change by early next year given the global outlook,” said Vaninder Singh, a Singapore-based economist at RBS who correctly predicted the MAS’s decisions at the two previous gatherings. “Once the meeting is behind us, once people start

positioning for April, that might start to push the Singapore dollar lower.”

The local dollar is set to weaken to S$1.39 versus the greenback by the middle of next year, a level last reached in March, according to the median of analysts’ forecasts. The currency has fallen 2.3 percent since the end of June to S$1.3790 as of 6:38 a.m. London time on Tuesday, as traders increase bets the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates. The Singapore dollar tumbled 6.6 percent last year, its biggest decline since the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

The MAS guides the Singapore dollar against a basket of currencies and adjusts the pace of appreciation or depreciation by changing the slope, width and center of a band. It refrains from disclosing details of the basket, the band, and the pace of appreciation or depreciation.

Michael Wan at Credit Suisse Group AG, predicts the authority will adjust the center of the band this week, one of only two economists in the survey with that view.

“Even if MAS easing doesn’t come in October, they will eventually have to do so given the structural economic changes and headwinds facing the economy,” he said. “The bias and risk are definitely for the currency to be weaker.” Bloomberg News

I

ndonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati sees her tax amnesty as more than just boosting budget cash: It is part of “a new social contract” between the government and people that represents a maturing of the still-young democracy.

“It is very important as one of the cornerstones for Indonesia to build a culture of democratic accountability,” Indrawati said in an interview at the Washington headquarters of the World Bank, where she was a managing director until earlier this year.

“This tax amnesty and the declaration of assets seem like saying that we as a country want to start a new chapter.” The finance minister, who was more or less driven into exile in Washington six years ago after trying to clean up corruption in a previous incarnation in the job, is also repositioning her country as a destination for the liquidity sloshing around the global financial system.

Unlike developed economies beset by negative rates, slow growth and aging demographics, Indonesia is young, it is expanding and offers good returns on investment, she says.

Indeed, unlike many nations flirting with populists and strongmen, Indonesians remain believers in the democratic system they

$12.7B The revenue expected to be generated by Indonesia’s tax amnesty

achieved after decades of Suharto’s dictatorship. That commitment has held firm even as the polity regularly let down the electorate by failing to deliver on promises, succumbing to corruption or simple incompetence, according to Indrawati.

Amnesty plan

President Joko Widodo lured Indrawati home from Washington with promises of the political cover to make it work this time. Widodo, known as Jokowi, wants to get back

money stashed overseas and increase domestic-tax revenue by using the amnesty aimed at raising 165 trillion rupiah ($12.7 billion) before it ends in March. Spending that money and more earmarked for railways, roads and ports is key to his plans to boost economic growth to 7 percent during his term, up from the average of less than 5 percent in the past two years.

“If you talk within the perspective of the reform in the past two decades after Indonesia had this reformasi, under the new democratic open system it is expected that the government and the people strike a new social contract,” the 54-yearold economist said. Reformasi is an Indonesian word for reform.

“It is a contract between the government that is elected and that should deliver its political promises with good governance, transparency and accountability,” she said. “And the people who support this government should do so not only through voting but also paying tax properly.

And in the past two decades that was not really happening on either side.”

Yet, in Jokowi she sees genuine moves to change—and confirms a story that he has provided foreign executives with his telephone number and told them to call him in the event of problems with regulations or officials. She said a finance minister “is really dependent on the commitment of the leader” to secure reform and strengthen the system.

She said in Cabinet Jokowi is asking the right questions, supporting

anticorruption measures and reform of the bureaucracy and looking to wind back regulations that impede development, even in some cases when officials are trying to lengthen them.

But in a world where a major economies are stuck around a 2-percent growth and global expansion is around 3 percent, and with commodity prices weak, the hurdles to a country like Indonesia pulling ahead appear high. Indrawati will have none of it, standing by a forecast for growth of 5 percent in 2016.

Boosting confidence

Indonesia needs to generate confidence in its prospects, she said.

While advanced countries are growing slowly, they have plenty of liquidity. The money is there and they’re not getting a return. Indonesia is growing quickly and has an emerging middle class.

“So why aren’t they coming? Why are they stuck in the negative rate bonds of advanced countries? Why aren’t they bringing the money to emerging countries? There is potential for growth,” she said. “So for a country like us, it’s up to us to show and explain and provide evidence that ‘hey our economy is strong enough. We have a good foundation and we have prospects.’ Especially in Indonesia we have a young demography, we have a growing middle class.

Why do you have to stick your money in countries which are aging, negative growth?” Bloomberg News

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Samsung Galaxy Note 7 sales stopped after new troubles

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Lebanese supporters of the Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah group hold placards as they take a selfie during a protest to show their solidarity with Yemen’s Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, in front the United Nations headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 10. AP

UN chief urges independent investigation of Yemen attacks

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NITED NATIONS—SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon on Monday urged the UN Human Rights Council to immediately establish an independent body to investigate rights abuses and other violations in Yemen, especially following last weekend’s “horrendous attack” by the Saudi-led coalition on a funeral hall.

The UN chief told reporters that Saturday’s air strikes in Yemen’s capital Saana, which killed over 140 people and injured more than 525 others, were the latest disasters in the Yemen conflict, which has left over 20 million people—“an astounding 80 percent of the population”—in need of humanitarian aid.

“Aerial attacks by the Saudi-led coalition have already caused immense carnage and destroyed much of the country’s medical facilities and other vital civilian infrastructure,” Ban said. “Bombing people already mourning the loss of loved ones is reprehensible.”

“This latest horrific incident demands a full inquiry,” he said. “More broadly, there must be accountability for the appalling conduct of this entire war.”

Climate of impunity

EARLIER on Monday, UN humanrights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein denounced the air strikes and

faulted the Human Rights Council for not doing more in the face of a “climate of impunity” in the impoverished, war-torn country.

He reiterated his calls for an independent investigation of abuses in Yemen, which the 47-member Geneva-based council, which includes Saudi Arabia, all but ignored at its last session in September.

Ban noted Zeid’s call and said his strong message to the Human Rights Council, especially after Saturday’s attacks, is “to fulfill its duty and act.”

“Despite mounting crimes by all parties to the conf lict, we have yet to see the results of any credible investigations,” the secretary-general said. “Excuses ring hollow given the pattern of violence throughout the conflict.

Parties cannot hide behind the fog of this war.”

Legal, moral duty

SINCE the Saudi-led, US-backed

coalition started launching air strikes against Shiite Houthi rebels in March 2015, at least 4,125 civilians have been killed and over 7,200 wounded in Yemen, Zeid’s office said in a statement, including 369 civilian casualties this month alone.

The Saudi-led coalition backs the internationally recognized government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. The coalition is fighting Shiite Houthi rebels and supporters of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Zeid expressed concerns that an escalation of hostilities could follow Saturday’s attack, saying “the international community has a legal and moral duty to react robustly to the increasingly horrific levels of civilian casualties in Yemen, just as it has in many other situations.”

Ban urged a cessation of hostilities “as the only way to protect civilians, and the resumption of political talks as the only way to end the conflict.”

Good political start

FRENCH Foreign Minister JeanMarc Ayrault said he and Ismael Ould Cheikh A hmed, the UN special envoy for Yemen, agreed at a meeting in Paris on Monday night “to quickly organize a new negotiation session.”

Ahmed expressed regret that the funeral hall air strikes took place “at a moment when important progress was obtained in the peace process...and especially at a moment when we were negotiating a long-term agreement including all concerned parties.”

He called on the parties to reduce tensions, saying “everything should be done to bring to justice the authors of this attack as soon as possible.”

Ayrault said it’s urgent to resume negotiations and called the peace plan “a good political start.”

“Now it should be applied and fighting should stop,” he said.

Dearer than thrones

GERMANY also expressed concern over the air strikes, with Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier saying “those responsible for this cruel act must be found,” and that such attacks must not be repeated.

He did not say who was responsible, but the Saudi-led coalition has the only warplanes known to be operating in Yemen.

“The many dead at the funeral should be a warning to all in Yemen and in the region who have political responsibility to seek possibilities now to resume the UN-mediated talks on a ceasefire and a political solution for Yemen,” Steinmeier said.

In Beirut nearly 200 supporters of the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah group protested outside the offices of the UN, holding banners showing Yemeni casualties, including children. In reference to the Saudi monarchy, protesters raised placards that read: “Yemeni children are dearer than your thrones.”

Hezbollah, which maintains a dominant militia force in Lebanon, has also aligned itself with the Houthi rebels in Yemen’s civil war. AP

AN FRANCISCO—Samsung said on Tuesday it is halting sales of the star-crossed Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, after a spate of fires involving new devices that were supposed to be safe replacements for recalled models.

The company ordered the suspension of sales on the recommendation of South Korean safety officials, who say they suspect a new defect in the replacement phones that may not be related to its batteries.

“We would have not taken this measure if it had looked like the problems could be easily resolved,” Oh Yu-cheon, a senior official at the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards that oversees product recalls, said in a phone interview. He said it would take more time than the agency originally thought to figure out what’s wrong.

In the meantime, the agency is urging consumers not to use the phones. Last month Samsung issued a global recall. It blamed a tiny manufacturing error in the battery that it said made the phones prone to catch fire.

Oh said the investigators are studying a different defect from the one Samsung said it had found in the first batch of Galaxy Note 7s. “ T he improved product does not have the same defect. That’s why we think there is a new defect,” Oh said.

In a statement issued in late Monday, Samsung Electronics Inc. said consumers with original Note 7 devices or replacements they obtained after the recall should turn them off and seek a refund or exchange them for different phones.

Officials from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission echoed that advice, saying they are investigating at least five incidents of fire or overheating reported since a formal recall in the US was announced on September 15.

“No one should have September to be concerned their phone will endanger them, their family or their property,” said Elliot Kaye, chairman of the safety commission, in a statement. He called Samsung’s decision to stop distributing the device “the right move” in light of “ongoing safety concerns.”

New overheating incidents

THE announcement follows several new incidents of overheating last week and deals a further blow to the world’s largest smartphone company. Leading wireless carriers have already said they would stop distributing new Note 7 phones as replacements for the earlier recall.

Samsung said it would ask all carriers and retailers to stop selling the phones and providing them as replacements for recalled devices. It said consumers should return their phones to the place where they purchased them. They can also get information from the company’s web site.

Analysts say the new problems pose a crisis for the South Korean tech giant, which is locked in fierce competition with Apple and other leading smartphone makers.

“This has been a real black eye on the product,” said Ben Bajarin,

a consumer tech industry analyst with the Creative Strategies firm.

What’s causing the fires?

THE new reports also raise questions about the cause and extent of the problem. Samsung has not said which of its two battery suppliers made the faulty batteries in the earlier Note 7s or clarified whose batteries are used in which Note 7 smartphones.

“What’s happened in the last few days just complicates things enormously,” said analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research. “It calls into question their ability to manage quality control and everything else that goes into that.”

Samsung did not indicate if it knows what caused the latest problems.“We are working with relevant regulatory bodies to investigate the recently reported cases involving the Galaxy Note7,” the company said in its statement.

It said “consumers’ safety remains our top priority.”

Earlier, a spokesman for the US safety commission said his agency is investigating five Note 7 incidents reported since September 15, although he said investigators had not confirmed whether all five involved recall replacements. But four consumers have told The Associated Press that their replacement phones caught fire—including two in Kentucky, one in Minnesota and one in Hawaii.

After the fire

DEE Decasa of Honolulu had just visited the Samsung website on her new Galaxy Note 7 when it began smok ing on Sunday morning. She was double checking that the replacement phone she received was OK. She took a screen shot of the page confirming her new phone was fine.

“Then boom, there was like a pop. I had it in my hand and then smoke started spewing out, this green yucky thing,” said Decasa, a bookkeeper.

She screamed for her husband and ran out of her bedroom. He grabbed an aluminum pan from the kitchen and told her to the put the phone in there. They called 911, and the phone was still sizzling when a policeman came about 20 minutes later.

Decasa said she thought “What happened? We were reassured these were the replacement ones.”

No one was injured.

Her husband said the plastic protective case his wife had around her phone may have protected her. Part of the plastic case appeared to have melted and got stuck to the aluminum pan.

The Decasas said Samsung is sending a representative to Honolulu on Tuesday to meet them and examine her phone.

A blow to Samsung

THE Note 7 is not Samsung’s most popular device; Samsung sells far more units of its Galaxy S7 phones than the more expensive Note 7. But analysts say the issue could hurt the company’s reputation and overall standing with consumers. The company’s shares fell 6.2 percent by midday on Tuesday in Seoul. AP

Fed up with Trump, Clinton, some voters weigh options N

EW YORK—Enough, already. In a campaign in which the size of a candidate’s genitalia has been publicly discussed, in a week in which shockingly sexual video has been unearthed and after a debate in which the leading contenders for the White House exposed new depths of down-and-dirty exchanges, some voters are ready to deny either major-party candidate their support.

“We’re screwed with either one of them,” said Sally Stevens, 63, of New Orleans.

Stevens tried to keep herself from tuning into Sunday night’s debate. “I completely lose hope and my anxiety level goes through the

roof,” she said. But she relented after about a half-hour, saying it was like attempting not to look when you drive by a car wreck. Watching brought no solace.

She is a lifelong Democrat and has, until now, always cast her vote for the party’s presidential candidate. She had hoped Sen. Bernie Sanders would be the nominee; in his place, she has decided to vote for Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

Both Clinton and Trump are too flawed, she said, and more similar than distinct. “It’s just spectacle, that’s all it is,” she said. “I don’t find anything substantial.”

Those feelings abound: An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted on September 15 to 18 found three out of four Americans felt frustrated by the election, and majorities also described themselves as angry and helpless. Fewer than one in five people said they felt proud of the 2016 race.

Very sad state

IN Washington Ron Bonjean said the campaign already was “in a very sad state” before the debate. The longtime Republican congressional staffer, who now runs a

corporate communications firm, said Trump’s suggestion he would jail Clinton if he’s elected amounted to “a nuclear bomb went off in American politics.”

Bonjean calls himself “a very confused Republican.” He won’t vote for a third-party candidate. He’s weighing whether to go with Trump or not vote at all. Even so, the 46-yearold expects the campaign to get even worse and for even more shocking revelations to arise as opposition researchers scrounge for more dirt. “This is a historical low campaign of modern times and last night was the lowest moment in debate history,” he said.

Jin Hua, a 28-year-old marketing consultant in Saint Petersburg, Florida, already has resigned himself to skipping voting for president, calling deciding between Clinton and Trump a “lose-lose.” He voted for President Obama four years ago and was hoping for Sanders this year, but won’t accept a candidate he says is simply “the lesser of two evils.”

“On one hand, we have Hillary Clinton, who has consistently demonstrated consistent deception,” he said. “On the other side, there’s Donald Trump. He’s a toxic human being to the consciousness of this country.

If he becomes president, our human values

as a nation will degrade to the dark ages.”

Tone of shock

CHRISTINA Greer, a political science professor at New York’s Fordham University, said the tone for the debate was set before it even started, with Trump holding a news conference with three women who accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment and even rape, accusations that have never brought any criminal charges.

“It’s just a new low in American politics and just set a tone of shock and awe for a lot of journalists and scholars,” she said. AP

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Wednesday, October 12, 2016

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2 economists win Nobel for showing how deals work best

Oliver Hart, the Andrew E. Furer professor of economics at Harvard, speaks on the phone at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on October 10 after winning the Nobel Prize in economics. Hart and Finnish economist Bengt Holmstrom, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, share the award for their contributions to contract theory. AP

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ET insiders easily cash in stock options, as Enron did, and you risk seeing executives abandon a failing company.

Encourage contractors to sacrifice quality to cut costs, and you might cause problems like those that led the US Justice Department to phase out privately run prisons.

Designing contracts is a tricky business. For their groundbreaking work on how to make contracts fairer and more effective, Oliver Hart of Harvard University and Bengt Holmstrom of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) won the 2016 Nobel prize for economics on Monday. They will share the 8-million-kronor ($930,000) award for their contributions to contract theory.

For decades, the two men have studied practical problems involving the countless kinds of contracts that underlie modern commerce: How should companies pay their executives? What types of tasks should government agencies outsource to private contractors? How best to write an auto-insurance policy to protect drivers from financial loss without lulling them into carelessness?

Giving incentives

PAY pack ages, Holmstrom’s work suggests, are best tailored to avoid either punishing or rewarding CEOs for happenings beyond their control.

“You don’t want to reward the CEO because the S&P 500 [stock index] has gone up 20 percent,” said Patrick Bolton of Columbia University Business School, who studied under Hart and has written a textbook on the economics of contracts. “You want to reward the CEO when his company outperforms the S&P.” Likewise, companies fare best when they establish pay packages that incentivize executives to prioritize the long term as much as the short term, to avoid focusing too much on quarterly profit expectations. “These kinds of insights into how we should design contracts are very important because we don’t want to give the wrong incentives to people,” said Tomas Sjostrom, a member of the Nobel committee. “We don’t want to reward them for things that they were not responsible for. We want to reward the right thing.”

True intellectuals

HART, 68, is a London-born US citizen who has taught at Harvard since 1993.

Holmstrom, 67, is an academic from Finland who formerly served on the board of the country’s mobile-phone company Nokia. Economists who have long known the two men and their work offered warm praise on Monday.

“This is the Nobel Prize in economics at its best,” said George Akerlof of George-

town University, who won the prize in 2001. “The character of both Bengt and Oliver shines through in their work and their character: They are true intellectuals and truly great people.”

At a news conference at MIT, Holmstrom declined to say whether he thought CEO pay—a hotly contentious issue in the United States and elsewhere—had become excessive.

“It is somewhat demand and supply working its magic,” he said.

But he said companies can give executives the wrong incentives, as the energy firm Enron did, when it allowed insiders to unload their stock options as the company fell into a death spiral.

“The problem wasn’t options,” Holmstrom said. “The problem was the way people could sell out.”

Sounds narrower

THE Internal Revenue Service used Hart as an expert witness in cases involving Black and Decker and Wells Fargo. At issue was whether some of the companies’ transactions had had a legitimate corporate purpose or had been designed just to reduce their tax bills.

Robert Gibbons at MIT’s Sloan School of Management notes that the term “contract theory” might make Holmstrom and Hart’s work sound narrower than it is. But, Gibbons explained, their research goes well beyond legally binding contracts. They have analyzed the practical arrangements worked out between many disparate players—partners within a law firm, say, or companies and their suppliers or government agencies and private contractors.

Gibbons says Holmstrom and Hart’s work is just now beginning to have a practical effect as it evolves from academic research to management training to real workplaces. “The real-world stuff is coming,” he said. “You’re starting to see it.”

Proved perceptive

IN his writing, Hart has expressed concern about private prisons: Would profit-seeking contractors overemphasize cost-cutting over maintaining quality?

His concerns proved perceptive: After discovering that private prisons were marred by more safety and security problems than government-run ones were, the Justice Department in August ordered the Bureau of Prisons to reduce and eventually end the use of private prisons. AP

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Wednesday, October 12, 2016 • Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

www.businessmirror.com.ph

As babies stricken by Zika turn 1, health woes mount

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In this October 3 photo, Gilbert Mundicha, a street vendor, dances while selling mobile-phone airtime vouchers to motorists in a wealthy multiracial suburbs in Harare, Zimbabwe. Massive joblessness in this once-prosperous southern African country has forced many to flood the streets, where they hawk anything from medicines to car parts. AP

Zimbabwe’s street vendors turn on style to win buyers

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ARARE, Zimbabwe—In his three-piece suit, matching hat and bow tie, Farai Mushayademo could easily pass for a celebrity musician—if only his job didn’t involve dodging cars at a busy intersection in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, selling bottled water and potato chips to passing motorists.

Mushayademo’s distinctive dress sense, with a different shiny suit every day, makes him a darling of customers and helps him beat the “rising competition,” he said.

Massive joblessness in this once-prosperous southern African country has forced many to flood the streets, where they hawk anything from medicines to car parts. A good gimmick can help a vendor stand out from the crowd.

While such scenes are common throughout A frica, they are unusual in Zimbabwe, where vendors once were found only at legally designated stalls. Now, as the economy plunges, such order is breaking down. Sidewalks in Harare and other cities and towns are hardly passable for pedestrians

11 percent The amount paid to a sexualassault victim who is critical of Hillary Clinton by a political action committee founded

by Trump ally Roger Stone due to the high volume of vendors.

Some plunge into the streets to target motorists.

“The suits are part of my marketing strategy,” Mushayademo told The Associated Press.

“Vendors are associated with shabbiness, but people want to buy food from someone who

is smartly dressed,” said the 35-year-old father of three, a tailor by profession. Tailors have been hit hard because of an influx of secondhand clothes smuggled from neighboring Mozambique that sell for as little as $1.

who sells mobile phone airtime vouchers on a street in a wealthy, multiracial suburb. He dances, makes military salutes and greets nearly every passing motorist while mimicking what he described as a “British accent.”

Antics

Loyalty

ZIMBA BW E ’S of f ic i a l u nemployment rate is 11 percent, according to the countr y’s statistics agency, Zimstat, but the figure excludes informal traders such as street hawkers who are officially defined as employed because they earn an income.

That sector is booming, with over 90 percent of the people officially defined as employed involved in informal trade, according to Zimstat figures. This country’s longtime leader, President Robert Mugabe, had promised to create 2.2 million jobs in five years during his 2013 election campaign. That hasn’t happened.

With the growing population of street vendors, some get creative to get ahead. Tired of shouting to market their wares, some have recorded sales pitches that they blast repeatedly over speakers, creating a chaotic buzz throughout Harare’s downtown area.

Others turn to performing.

“My antics are meant to cultivate a personal relationship with customers,” said Gilbert Mundicha,

MOTORISTS love him for it, and he appears to have built a loyal customer base. Some stop their cars to buy specifically from him.

Others roll down their windows to greet him by name.

“Business is good,” Mundicha said. The brashness of some street vendors has drawn the attention of established businesses, which are moving in to maximize their own marketing.

Mundicha was wearing a T-shirt branded with the logo of a popular radio station. He said marketing people often gave him their branded T-shirts to wear.

Mushayademo, whose trademark is his three-piece suits, last month appeared in an issue of a leading clothing chain’s in-store magazine.

“I am looking for an agent. I can be a successful fashion model,” he said.

His eyes darted around for signs of both customers and the police, whose running battles with street vendors in a bid to clean up what was once one of Africa’s cleanest cities recently involved firing tear gas. AP

ECIFE, Brazil—Two weeks shy of his first birthday, doctors began feeding Jose Wesley Campos through a nose tube because swallowing problems had left him dangerously underweight.

Learning how to feed is the baby’s latest struggle as medical problems mount for him and many other infants born with small heads to mothers infected with the Zika virus in Brazil.

“It hurts me to see him like this. I didn’t want this for him,” said Jose’s mother, Solange Ferreira, breaking into tears as she cradled her son.

A year after a spike in the number of newborns with the defect known as microcephaly, doctors and researchers have seen many of the babies develop swallowing difficulties, epileptic seizures and vision and hearing problems.

While more study is needed, the conditions appear to be causing more severe problems in these infants than in patients born with small heads because of the other infections known to cause microcephaly, such as German measles and herpes. The problems are so particular that doctors are now calling the condition congenital Zika syndrome.

“We are seeing a lot of seizures.

And now they are having many problems eating, so a lot of these children start using feeding tubes,” said Dr. Vanessa Van der Linden, a pediatric neurologist in Recife who was one of the first doctors to suspect that Zika caused microcephaly.

Writing history

ZIKA, mainly transmitted by mosquito, was not known to cause birth defects until a large outbreak swept through northeastern states in Latin America’s largest nation, setting off alarm worldwide. Numerous studies confirmed the link.

Seven percent of the babies with microcephaly that Van der Linden and her team have treated were also born with arm and leg deformities that had not previously been linked to other causes of microcephaly, she said.

To complicate matters, there are babies whose heads were normal at birth but stopped growing proportionally months later. Other infants infected with the virus in the womb did not have microcephaly but developed different problems, such as a patient of Van der Linden’s who started having difficulties moving his left hand.

“We may not even know about the ones with slight problems out there,” Van der Linden said. “We are writing the history of this disease.”

On a recent day, Jose laid on a blue mat wearing just brown moccasins and a diaper, his bony chest pressed by a respiratory therapist helping him clear congested airways.

Like a newborn

JOSE, who has been visited by The Associated Press three times in the last year, is like a newborn. He is slow to follow objects with his

crossed eyes. His head is unsteady when he tries to hold it up, and he weighs less than 13 pounds, far below the 22 pounds that is average for a baby his age.

Breathing problems make his cries sound like gargling, and his legs stiffen when he is picked up. To see, he must wear tiny blue-rimmed glasses, which makes him fussy.

Arthur Conceicao, who recently turned 1, has seizures every day despite taking medication for epilepsy. He also started taking highcalorie formula through a tube after he appeared to choke during meals.

“It’s every mom’s dream to see their child open his mouth and eat well,” said his mother, Rozilene Ferreira, adding that each day seems to bring new problems.

Studies are under way to determine if the timing of the infection during pregnancy affects the severity of the abnormalities, said Ricardo Ximenes, a researcher at the Fiocruz Institute in Recife.

Also, three groups of babies whose mothers were infected with Zika are being followed for a study funded by the US National Institutes of Health. The groups include infants born with microcephaly, some born with normal-sized heads found to have brain damage or other physical problems and babies who have not had any symptoms or developmental delays.

In despair

AT birth, Bernardo Oliveira’s head measured more than 13 inches, well within the average range. His mother, Barbara Ferreira, thought her child was spared from the virus that had infected her during pregnancy and stricken many newborns in maternity wards in her hometown of Caruaru, a small city 80 miles west of Recife.

But Bernardo cried nonstop. The pediatrician told Ferreira that her baby was likely colicky and would get better by the third month. Instead, the crying got worse, so Ferreira took him to a government-funded event where neurologists were seeing patients with suspected brain damage. “At the end of the second month, beginning of the third, his head stopped growing,” Ferreira said. “Bernardo was afflicted by the Zika virus after all. I was in despair.”

In Brazil the government has reported 2,001 cases of microcephaly or other brain malformations in the last year. So far, only 343 have been confirmed by tests to have been caused by Zika, but the Health Ministry argues that the rest are most likely caused by the virus.

Signs of progress

HEALTH Minister Ricardo Barros said there was a drop of 85 percent in microcephaly cases in August and September compared to those months last year, when the first births started worrying pediatricians. He credited growing awareness of the virus and government attempts to combat mosquitoes through spraying campaigns. AP

3 Syrians aid German police in alleged bomb-plot suspect B ERLIN—A Syrian man wanted for allegedly preparing a bombing attack was apprehended by three of his countrymen, who overpowered him, tied him up in their apartment and then alerted police, authorities said on Monday.

The overnight arrest of Jaber Albakr ended a nearly two-day nationwide search for the 22-year-old that German authorities launched after finding several pounds of explosives and components hidden inside an apartment in the eastern city of Chemnitz on Saturday.

Albakr arrived in Germany amid a flood of 890,000 asylum-seekers last year. Saxony criminal police chief Joerg Michaelis said that the three Syrians who captured him recognized the suspect from

wanted posters police posted online as part of the manhunt.

After taking him to their apartment late Sunday night, two of the Syrians bound and held Albakr while the third brought a mobile phone photo of Albakr to a local police station, leading to the arrest early Monday, Michaelis said.

Prosecutors and police said on Monday that they considered Albakr an extremist with likely links to the Islamic State group. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency had been watching him since September and alerted Saxony authorities about his alleged possible plot on Friday, authorities said.

No indications

WHEN police raided the apartment

in the city of Chemnitz where he was thought to be staying on Saturday, Albakr was able to flee. Inside the apartment they found 1.5 kilograms of “extremely dangerous explosives” and components, according to federal prosecutors.

Criminal police chief Michaelis said that, at this stage of the investigation, “the behavior and actions of the suspect currently speak for an IS context.” He didn’t elaborate.

A security official said there was no indication yet that Albakr was being directed by the IS group, but that investigators still were combing through seized evidence. The official wasn’t authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The police said it was not clear when and

how the suspect met up with his three countrymen in Leipzig, about 80 kilometers from Chemnitz, or if they already knew him.

They would not release any further information about the three Syrians who apprehended Albakr.

If the signs of his having an extremist background were substantiated, “the people who gave the tip are of course in danger,” the police chief said.

Federal prosecutors, who handle terrorism investigations in Germany, said in a statement on Monday they had no indications that a target already had been chosen for an attack. Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of the domestic intelligence agency, later told ARD public broadcaster that their

investigation suggests the suspect had “an eye on the Berlin airports” as potential targets.

On edge

A 33-year-old Syrian at whose Chemnitz apartment police found the hidden explosives was arrested over the weekend and is considered a co-conspirator in the alleged bomb plot, prosecutors said.

The explosives were described as similar to the ones used in the deadly November 13 attacks in Paris and the March 22 attacks in Brussels. Known as TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, it is fairly easy to make and detonate, the police said.

“According to everything we know today, the preparations in

Chemnitz are similar to the preparations for the attacks in Paris and Brussels,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said.

A bomb squad destroyed the explosives Saturday in a pit outside the five-story apartment building because they were considered too dangerous to transport.

The incident comes amid ongoing concerns about the flood of asylum seekers that entered Germany last year and increasing support for populist parties with anti-migrant rhetoric.

The country also has been on edge since two attacks in July carried out by asylum seekers and claimed by the Islamic State group, in which multiple people were injured and the assailants were killed. AP

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ExportUnlimited BusinessMirror

DTI holds 1st Packaging and Labeling Summit for MSMEs

Editor: Efleda P. Campos • Wednesday, October 12, 2016 A9

The Philippines as ‘Franchise Hub of Asia’

By Eric Elnar

Commercial Attaché/Trade Service Officer Philippine Trade and Investment Center-Dubai

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MARKET DEVELOPMENT UPDATES

ITH the Philippines’s growing economy thriving on the ingenuity of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and talents of young entrepreneurs, the franchising industry remains a viable investment option—more so, with the projected growth of up to 20 percent and with about 300 local and international brands entering the market in 2016.

DEPARTMENT of Trade and Industry’s Export Marketing Bureau (DTIEMB) Director Senen M. Perlada during the opening ceremonies of the Packaging and Labeling Summit at the Philippine Trade Training Center in Pasay City.

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HE Department of Trade and Industry, through the Export Marketing Bureau (DTI-EMB), held the first Philippine Packaging and Labeling Summit under the Philippine Export Competitiveness Program (PECP), with a theme dubbed as “Enhancing Competitiveness through Packaging Innovation and Labeling Standards Compliance,” on September 29 at the Philippine Trade Training Center, Pasay City.

Participated in by micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and experts in the field of packaging, the event served as a pilot program that offered exporters and wouldbe exporters the knowledge and

awareness on current global trends in packaging and labeling.

The 2016 Business Survey of the International Trade Center (ITC) on nontariff measures (NTMs) in the Philippines showed that close

to three-quarters of exporters and importers in the Philippines suffer from nontariff measures.

The report said almost 60 percent of exporters’ NTM-related obstacles come from product-specific measures, such as conformity assessments (29 percent) and technical requirements (27 percent). Technical requirements include packaging and labeling.

DTI-EMB Director Senen M. Perlada said during the summit that DTI-EMB is extending its support in order to address these NTMs. “We wish to help these exporters to maximize all available opportunities offered by our initiatives in addressing such obstacles. We also urge them to maximize their markets through our FTAs [free-trade agreements],” Perlada said.

Perlada also urged entrepreneurs present during the event to continue maximizing the growing numbers of Internet users worldwide by including e-commerce in their business models.

“The availability of the internet makes it easier for exporters and entrepreneurs to become closer to their consumers. Packaging and labeling serve as our products’ spokesman to our consumers, we need to make sure that they respond to the trend and technical requirements,” Perlada emphasized.

Resource speakers from different offices covering topics, such as Philippine labeling standards; packaging trends and requirements for large markets, such as European Union (EU), the United States (US), Japan, and specific products, such as halal, cosmetics and food products, discussed relevant information to the attendees of the summit.

Also present during the event were experts from the Department of Science and Technology’s Food and Drug Administration, Food Development Council, Packaging Institute of the Philippines, Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines and other concerned agencies. Kate Bondoc

PHL app developers confident in global mobile competition this year

By Roderick L. Abad Contributor

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ELIEVING that Filipino talents are not just confined within the premier Manila but across the archipelago, the Mobile Challenge Asia Pacific (MCAP) Philippines 2016 is, once again, open for young entrepreneurs and innovators to represent the country in the regional and global competitions on development of applications or apps, Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile solutions in both software and hardware.

“We’re not looking for the usual suspects or the best teams coming out from Manila, where you get a lot of the best local teams. This is a nonprofit effort, so we’re looking to reach out to the base of the pyramid as much as possible by going into the provinces,” Professor Paris de L’Etraz told the BusinessMirror at the sidelines of MCAP Philippines Acceleration Days 2016 held on September 17 at the Innovation Hub of the Department of Trade and Industry’s International Offices in Makati City over the weekend.

The founder of Global Mobile Challenge (GMC) and managing director of VentureLab at IE Business School Madrid said mobile technology is exploding, and now is a “perfect time to get in.”

Emerging markets, like the Philippines, he noted, has a big potential to play in the multibillion-dollar appdevelopment industry, considering an enormous talent pool abounding in both the National Capital Region and in other parts of the country.

He said Filipinos’ entrepreneurial skills and innovative ideas related to mobile are innate yet need further development, the reason for the formation of the MCAP Philippines, he said.

This is a national competition for the GMC—an international entrepreneurship competition where innovators from around the world first compete in their global region to win a trip to Barcelona to take the overall crown.

The latter started in 2013 in the Middle East. Through MCAP Philippines, this contest has been in the country since its

inception three years ago, initially attracting around 400 entries at its first staging.

“And these came primarily from the provinces,” L’Etraz said. “So for us, it’s not so much about quality; it’s about volume because we’re trying to change the way people think about entrepreneurship [or] developing mobile solutions.”

While he conceded their ideas are not that “great” in the beginning of the contest, what matters most is their influence to participants in terms of changing the way they look at business.

“That’s the real objective here, and that’s why we want to keep perking up this year,” he said.

MCAP Philippines 2016 accepts competing teams consisting of two to six applicants, between 18 and 35 years old, sans any current venture-capital funding of more than $250,000.

Deadline of submission of entries is on October 17, from where the top 20 teams will be selected to pitch their proposals in the national finals in Manila in November.

The top 3 finalists will then represent the Philippines at the Asia- Pacific Regional

Finals in Singapore this December for a chance to join the Global Finals in Barcelona, Spain, during the Mobile World Congress from February 27 to March 2, 2017.

Initially, 57 teams have already registered online from Manila.

L’Etraz and the rest of his team was in Cebu for acceleration event on September 14, and soon in other areas nationwide.

“We hope to reach Davao and [other areas in] Mindanao and all the rest of the provinces so that we can reach people, who normally are not exposed to this level of competition. We probably have over 150 teams in total, combining with Cebu and the provinces this year,” he said of their expectations for this year’s leg of MCAP Philippines.

Confident of the competency of local talents, he expressed hopes another Filipino team will replicate the success of 1Export as the first finalist from the country to go all the way to the Global Finals in 2015.

“We’re very honored, impressed and happy that the Philippines made it to Barcelona last year,” he said.

The Philippine Franchise Association’s (PFA) Chairman Emeritus Samie Lim also projected the Philippines will cement its footing as the “Franchise Hub of Asia” with the current pace of growth. (Note that this data came from news clippings dated June and July 2016, based on statements from the PFA.) The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), through its various Philippine Trade and Investment Centers (PTIC) worldwide, has been promoting franchising for our overseas kababayan. PTIC has developed programs on franchising Philippine brands, such as seminars and business matching to bring together franchise owners and franchisees, due-diligence advice for both Filipino franchisor and overseas franchisee, and promotional activities for franchise events both abroad and in the Philippines.

The DTI works with various stakeholders in the franchising sector, such as the industry associations, in promoting franchising to overseas Filipinos as part of the MSME development in the country.

Franchising in the Philippines has thrived as a self-regulating industry. Industry associations, such as the PFA and Association of Filipino Franchisers Inc. (AFFI), with more than half of the over 1,200 franchise brands in the Philippines, under their leadership, have grown the industry to its current level. The public may be advised to deal only with legitimate franchisors, and if possible, members of PFA, AFFI and other self-regulating associations.

Franchise owners are encouraged to join industry associations.

PTIC-Dubai, in recent months, organized and participated in franchising seminars by the top franchise associations in the Philippines, the PFA and the AFFI. During the Philippine Business Council-Dubai Franchising Seminar, in collaboration with the AFFI in May in Dubai, more than 50 mostly Filipino prospective franchisees attended. The seminar was opened by Paul Raymund P. Cortes, Philippine consul general to Dubai. The main speaker, Armando Bartolome, chairman of AFFI, spoke on “Investing in a Franchise Business in the Philippines.” Some of the Philippines’s established and new franchise concepts —Julie’s Bakeshop, Fiorgelato, Generics Pharmacy, Seaoil, Nail It!, Trueblends Tea+Coffee and Acquasuisse Perfume Bar—were also marketed during the event as available franchise opportunities.

Commercial Attaché Eric C. Elnar of PTIC-Dubai gave the closing remarks. This is the second franchising seminar in Dubai in the last six months, after the PFA’s event in November 2015 organized

by PTIC-Dubai.

The DTI’s trade posts in Dubai and Jeddah also invited participants for PFA’s Franchise Asia Philippines 2016 conference and expo in July.

Among the more than 100 targeted companies that are current and prospective franchisees of Philippine brands, PTIC Dubai and Jeddah confirmed two attendees from the UAE, one from Qatar, and an industry leader as speaker.

J&J launches Global Services site in PHL

J

OHNSON & JOHNSON (J&J), a leading consumer, medical and pharmaceutical company in the world, has recently launched its Global Services (GS) site in Parañaque City, the Department of Trade and Industry’s Export Marketing Bureau said.

The site will provide high-quality and cost-effective transactional finance, human resources and Procurement processing and reporting services for total, global J&J community, executed at the global, regional and country levels.

Apart from the global site in the Philippines, J&J also has regional GS sites across the globe—Suzhou in China (Asia Pacific); Prague in Czech Republic (EMEA); Bogota in Columbia (Latin America); and Tampa, Florida, in the US. The opening of the GS Manila Site is aligned with the strategies for export growth and development laid out in the Philippine Export Development Plan (PEDP) 2015-2017.

The GS Manila Site constitutes interventions on services aligned with the country’s comparative

advantage.

DTI-EMB Director Senen Perlada said the PEDP extends a package of support to selected sectors that addresses their vulnerabilities and strengthens their capacity to meet the challenges in the global market.

Shared services centers (SSCs), such as the GS Manila Site, are one of these sectors. Perlada said the Philippines is host to one quarter of all SSCs across the Asean region. The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) said the “main driver of GDP growth was the services sector, which accelerated to 7.9 percent for the first quarter of 2016, from 5.5 percent of last year.”

Perlada said services exports are estimated to increase between 9 percent and 10.3 percent this year and between 9.9 percent and 12 percent in 2017, with growth being driven by the strategies for export growth and development laid out in the PEDP 2015-2017.

Perlada said total exports in 2014 reached $86.9 billion, with goods accounting for 71 percent, or $62.1 billion, while services made up 21 percent at $24.8 billion.

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

OCT 18

Event: QBO Open House Time: 6 -9 p.m.

Venue: QBO Innovation Hub, G/F DTI International Building, 375 Sen. Gil Puyat Avenue, Makati City

A10 Wednesday, October 12, 2016 • Editor: Angel R. Calso

Opinion BusinessMirror

editorial

An economics Nobel for examining reality

T

his year’s economics Nobel Prize has gone to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström, for their work on the theory of contracts. For good primers on the winners and their work, check out the blog of economist Kevin Bryan, several posts by the alwaysreliable Marginal Revolution, and the summary written by Bloomberg View’s Tyler Cowen.

The research here is deep microeconomic stuff. It’s about incentives, and imperfect information, and long-term relationships. It’s about delicate strategic interactions between people who don’t know each other’s capabilities or intentions. But it’s related to lots of real-world economic issues—performance pay, mergers and acquisitions, bank lending and corporate structure.

What it’s not about is the kind of economics you read about in the news.

It’s not about growth or unemployment, fiscal stimulus or interest rates, trade agreements or productivity. It might be indirectly related to those things— Holmström’s work on financial crises and debt certainly has relevance for what happened in 2008. But it isn’t what you expect to see economists arguing about when you open up Bloomberg or pick up the New York Times.

It’s not macroeconomics—the study of how the broad economy works.

That’s interesting, because in the past, the Nobel went almost exclusively to macro research. In the decade after the prize was created by the Bank of Sweden in 1969, nine out of 10 prizes went to things that we would call “macro.” In the 1980s, it was about half. Nowadays, prizes for macro research are less dominant. The last true macro prize was in 2011, for the empirical work of Christopher Sims and Thomas Sargent. Other macro prizes came in 2010, 2006 and 2004. The prizes in 2013 for financial economics and 2008 for the economics of trade and geography have some macro flavor—after all, trade and finance both affect business cycles and growth—but both are now considered distinct fields, with their own distinct methods and data sources.

Meanwhile, the number of prizes in fields, like game theory, is on the rise.

This year’s winners do work that’s somewhat similar to that of 2014 winner, Jean Tirole, who studied corporations. Micro theorists also won prizes in 2012, 2007 and 2005. Though this is a small sample to work with, it does seem as if micro theory’s star is on the rise within the profession.

What should we make of this development? Economics debates in the news media and on the blogs tend to make a big distinction between macro and micro, painting the former as unscientific and the latter as serious science.

There’s a grain of truth to that, but it’s not that simple.

What really happened was that macro developed first. Economists saw big, important phenomena, like growth, recessions and poverty, happening around them, and they wrote down simple theories to explain what they saw.

The theories started out literary, and became more mathematical and formal as time went on. But they had a few big things in common. They assumed the people and the companies in the economy were each very tiny and insignificant, like particles in a chemical solution. And they typically assumed that everyone follows very simple rules—companies maximize profits, consumers maximize the utility they get from consuming things. Pour all of these tiny simple companies and people into a test tube called “the market”, shake them up, and poof—an economy pops out.

Even today’s macro theories are similar in spirit. Most of what you see in academic seminars or at central banks are so-called general-equilibrium models.

But in the meantime, economic theorists have been branching out in different directions. They began to think much more seriously and deeply about how people and companies behave and interact. And those efforts are paying off with real-world applications—Google’s auctions, kidney transplants, or government sales of wireless spectrum rights are a few of the better-known examples, but there are more all the time. And theories, like those of Hart and Holmström, are changing the way companies think about everyday economic issues, like performance pay and mergers and acquisitions. Meanwhile, most of the explosion in empirical work is in micro fields, if only because those have much more copious and reliable data. Bloomberg Editorial

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There is much to learn from the elderly. As shown in the life of Lolo Cesar, nurturing close family and social ties results in happier and more meaningful lives; the elderly should not be underestimated for they are still highly capable of adapting to the changing times and contributing to society; and Filipino workers have much to benefit as covered members of the SSS.

Even at the national level, the elderly are held in high regard, with government officials crafting and implementing policies to promote the welfare of senior citizens through special benefits and privileges. Part of this initiative is the annual celebration of the National Elderly Week held every first week of October, as mandated by Proclamation 470 signed in September 1994.

One of the government institutions actively engaged in serving the elderly is the Social Security System (SSS), which disburses monthly benefits to more than 2 million pensioners at present. Among these SSS pensioners is 73-year-old Cesario “Lolo Cesar” Dayag, whose life provides a treasure trove of valuable lessons for the young and old alike.

Love for family. Even with a family of his own and despite his advanced age, Lolo Cesar is

Kung magpapa-stress ka, mabuburyo ka lang,” he quips.

Even more impressive is Lolo Cesar’s continuing contribution to society through his active participation in organizations, such as the Senior Citizens of Barangay Malaya; Committee of Ethics in Barangay Gulod, Novaliches; and Senior Prostate Advocacy Club in East Avenue Medical Center.

Saving for retirement and other contingencies. A covered SSS member since 1966, Lolo Cesar has contributed a total of over P8,000 during his working years. Strenuous activities took its toll on Lolo Cesar’s health and he succumbed to pneumonia in 1996, for which he was able to claim SSS disability benefits for two consecutive years, which amounted to P32,300.

He currently receives P3,049.20 in retirement pension per month, which he spends for basic needs, such as food and clothing. Since his retire-

Susie G. Bugante

All About Social Security mong the sources of Filipino pride is our sacred tradition to treat the elderly with utmost respect and reverence in recognition of their valuable wisdom acquired through decades of life experiences. For those of us who grew up with our grandparents, their role in shaping our values and beliefs during our growing up years is undeniable. dedicated in looking after his 93-year-old mother, who was widowed after his father, who previously worked in the Armed Forces of the Philippines, passed away. In his own precious way, Lolo Cesar’s commitment to his mother echoes this year’s theme for the National Elderly Week, which is “Pagmamahal at Respeto ng Nakababata, Nagpapaligaya sa Nakakatanda.”

Active aging. Age is just a number, and Lolo Cesar keeps himself busy by watching movies and ballroom dancing, which is his favorite pastime. His energy and timeless dance routines enliven social events, such as the SSS Pensioners Day, where he often participates in ballroom dancing sessions and production numbers.

“Walang ibang nagpe-perform kundi kami. Mahiyain sila, eh kami sige lang ng sige. Gusto ko kasi masaya talaga.

ment in 2002, his pension benefits have added up to nearly P500,000 at present. His experience is just one of the many examples of the generous return that SSS members receive from their monthly contributions, which serve as their savings for retirement and other financial contingencies.

“Maganda ’yung pagkaka-member ko ng SSS. Nakakatulong ito sa pangaraw araw na pagkain ko, pambili ng mga gamit [at] damit, kasi biruin mo, lifetime yan, ’di ba? Kung hindi ako nag-member, wala akong maaasahan, eh hindi ko naman alam kung makakapagbigay ’yung mga anak ko.

Eh, nagsipag-asawa na sila, may pamipamilya na rin. Mahirap din umasa eh,” he explains.

There is much to learn from the elderly. As shown in the life of Lolo Cesar, nurturing close family and social ties results in happier and more meaningful lives; the elderly should not be underestimated for they are still highly capable of adapting to the changing times and contributing to society; and Filipino workers have much to benefit as covered members of the SSS. 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.

What are still lacking in govt’s antipoverty programs?

Lorenzo M. Lomibao Jr., Gerard S. Ramos Lyn B. Resurreccion, Efleda P. Campos

Online Editor Social Media Editor

Chairman of the Board & Ombudsman President VP-Finance VP Advertising Sales Advertising Sales Manager Group Circulation Manager

Valuable lessons from the elderly

Michael Makabenta Alunan

on the contrary

I

n the National Anti-Poverty Sectoral Summit held late last week, there are indications there is nothing strategically different with past antipoverty government programs, except the fact the Left is now well represented, led by National Anti-Poverty Commission Chairman and Secretary Liza Largoza-Masa of Gabriela fame.

President Duterte is right in involving the Left directly in governance, which is a double-edged sword. He has given the Left the chance, for the first time, to implement what they have long been fighting against—the inequities in society. On the other hand, he has effectively disarmed them with burden to prove their worth and show a better way to bail out people from poverty. And if some-

thing fouls up, the Left can no longer blame the government but themselves.

Red not expert? You cannot question probably the sincerity of many revolutionaries as they make sacrifices of their lives to create change for the better, ironically, through violent means. They are inspired by the likes of revolutionary icon Che Guevarra, who once said that it may sound ridiculous,

but “revolutionaries are inspired by the greatest feelings of love.”

However, as it is said, “the road to perdition or hell is paved with good intentions,” which is true with history replete with stories of how revolutions failed as their leaders lack the expertise of running an economy.

The Left may know at destroying, but poor at building. It is good at political organizing and agitation and propaganda (“Agit-prop”), but are poor in business and development.

The Left always blames poverty more on the oligarchic control of the economy by “some 41 families,” and what they claim are problem, like “bureaucrat-capitalism,” “feudalism” and “neocolonialism,” which they say can only be resolved genuinely through a bloody clash or class struggle, and replaced with socialist central planning, which history has totally failed in many countries.

What the Left lacks is the expertise in livelihood development, finance, marketing and overall project management, which are vital

in running business ventures that increase the pie.

Free market has done no better? If the Left is bound to fail, the freer market system, in place for about three to four decades now, has not seemed to have done any better.

In the dog-eat-dog free-market system, growth does not trickle down much to the poor partly due to an “Elite Capture.”

Based on an Asian Development Bank (ADB) study done on 51 developing countries, for every 1-percent increase in GDP or income, poverty is reduced by 1.5 percent and even as high as 2 percent among Asian countries, except the Philippines.

We’ve had cases of high growth rates in past years and, yet, poverty rate even worsened. More so, in agriculture, where about two-thirds of those living below the poverty line is based, which simply agriculture and the fishery sector has been performing dismally for many decades now.

Records show because of our poor See “Alunan,” A11

opinion@businessmirror.com.ph

Opinion

Two burials, one death

Actuarial Society of the Philippines

BusinessMirror

Atty. Dennis B. Funa

Teddy Locsin Jr.

INSURANCE FORUM

Free fire Continued from A1

S

he said, “Don’t go. I have a question. Are you for Ramon V. Mitra?”

“Yes,” I said with a hint of superiority.

“Well, he will lose,” she said. “You know this election decides if the Marcoses return to power by the way they lost it—elections.”

“I know,” I said, “but they won’t win. Monching will win.”

“No, Teddy Boy, he will lose,” she said, cool as mint.

My small anger management issue kicked in.

“He will win,” I insisted—my voice trying to crack her calm. “And, and,” I sputtered, “I’d rather lose with the man who was jailed with my father— and your husband”—attempt at sarcasm there—“than win with the man who jailed them.”

She smiled. I closed the door behind me.

I met a New York Times correspondent who wanted to cover a campaign. “You came to the right place,” I said, “we’re gonna win.”

I took him to a Mitra rally and never saw him again. Later, he called me from the airport, saying he was going home, and that my candidate would lose and Miriam DefensorSantiago would win.

I thought I should interview Miriam.

To catch her up, my first question was, “You said you will line up customs people and shoot them.”

“Oh, Teddy Boy,” she said sweetly, “what lousy law school did you go to? A president cannot do that. He swears to uphold the law.” My wife took over the interview and they got on famously after that.

Election day came. The votes came in. Mitra sank lower and lower in the count. But in ABS-CBN’s quick count—a super exit poll, not extrapolating from samplings but communicating the count as it was being made—Miriam got vote after vote after vote, Aparri to Jolo.

Then, for a reason Commission on Elections never explained, the ABSCBN quick count was blacked out.

Suitcases stuffed with papers poured into Greenhills. Two weeks later the quick count was allowed to resume to show Miriam losing. After the winner was proclaimed, the young were inconsolable. So Miriam made many appearances in schools. This one was in Santo Tomas.

We walked with her down the corridor leading to the auditorium. We heard clapping from the classrooms.

At first a smattering of applause, but quickly more and more of it. Soon the corridor was reverberating with claps and cheers. It reached a crescendo when the doors to the auditorium opened and a blast of cheers and applause hit us in the face. Cries of a hurricane force, conveying grief with the result, disgust with democracy, and total contempt for the voting process washed over us like bile.

Miriam walked to the podium.

The air was electric with energy. She turned to the audience and bowed.

Pandemonium broke lose. She did not say a word. They had said it all for her. That evening, in the long corridor past the morgue and in that

Alunan. . .

continued from A10

performance in agriculture, we have reduced rural poverty slightly from 46.9 percent in 2000 to only 40 percent by 2014. In contrast, Thailand reduced rural poverty from 51.5 percent in 2001 to 13.9 percent in 2013, and in a much shorter period.

Indonesia reduced rural poverty to 13.8 percent in 2014, Vietnam down to 17.4 percent in 2010, and Malaysia to 8.4 percent as early as 2009.

Again, the Philippines posted GDP growth of 7 percent in the second quarter of 2016, besting Chi-

That evening, the Philippines lost the distinction it won at Edsa and sank to become what it is today, the lowest form of democracy in history. That day, we committed the original sin that has ever since tarnished our elections, not only with cheating—now electronic in its celerity—but with choices inferior to Miriam in quality.

SANTIAGO

hall, democracy died the death it deserved. Women in the media gloated: Well, better that “that” woman was cheated than she became president.

Not so long ago, in another election, the champions of people power sat in the gallery of Congress smug as bugs, as though they knew the result before it was proclaimed even though the fight was close. Although I, too, voted for their candidate, I kept insisting that we go behind the cover page of the certificates of canvass (COCs) to double-check the totals.

The session was recessed with exasperation. I was called to the Speaker’s room. A chief of the Senate phoned a champion of democracy in the gallery and within earshot of me said, “Your boy just won’t listen to reason.”

A staff of the Speaker slipped me a manual of procedure open to a page with a stenciled paragraph precisely allowing a look behind the cover page of COCs. The phone was handed to me and a voice said, “Do you want another actor to become president?”

“No,” I said, “I just want the winner, regardless of what he did for a living, to be the president.” I got in my car and left Congress. I hadn’t reached Commonwealth Avenue when my phone rang and a voice pleaded that I return. I did. And I expressed my vote in a way far too clever to be honest. I explained my vote as follows, “I see no obstacle to the proclamation of…” and left for good with a bad conscience.

That evening, the Philippines lost the distinction it won at Edsa and sank to become what it is today, the lowest form of democracy in history.

That day, we committed the original sin that has ever since tarnished our elections, not only with cheating— now electronic in its celerity—but with choices inferior to Miriam in quality. With the burial of Miriam, we interred our last best hope of democracy; and above both, their remains we erected a plinth to shaft the mournful air and commemorate its repeated mockery. Good luck. na’s growth of 6.7 percent, Vietnam’s 5.6 percent, Indonesia’s 5.2 percent, Malaysia’s 4.0 percent and Thailand’s 3.5 percent. However, agriculture declined by 2.1 percent from April to June this year, which is the fifth consecutive quarter of declines. We hope the government can reverse this in time.

Technology is crucial. Government’s flagship antipoverty program is the Conditional Cash Transfer renamed Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, which is consumptive and mendicant in nature and, therefore, not sustainable.

Instead, these billions be poured in sustainable production-oriented,

T

he Actuarial Society of the Philippines (ASP) is the only professional organization of actuaries in the country. It is expressly recognized under Section 345 of the Amended Insurance Code (it is also mentioned in Section 189). Its objective is to develop and qualify professional actuaries and to advance actuarial science.

Its membership is classified into affiliates, associates and fellows.

Actuaries serve in various fields, such as the life-insurance industry, nonlife industry, preneed industry, health maintenance organization industry, social security, banking and finance, and various consultancies. More than 50 percent of the fellows of ASP are employed by insurance companies. As of April 2011, it has 246 members with 64 fellows, 58 associates and 124 affiliates. The ASP became a member of the International Actuarial Association in 1998.

Actuaries “determine the chances of future risks, like birth, disability, accidental injury, fire, damage to property, need for medical care, or premature death, and calculate the cost of financing these uncertain events by insurance or other related means. They use scientific actuarial principles, so that the financial aspects of these uncertainties can be exchanged for the certainty of a premium payment.”

On March 12, 1953, the Philippine Actuarial Society was formed with eight charter members. Among the founders were Dr. Emeterio Roa, Dr. Luis Salvosa, Exequiel Sunico Sevilla and Dr. Manuel Hizon. Roa was the first Filipino actuary. He was an actuarial pensionado at the University of Michigan. Upon his return to the Philippines in 1924, he served for

one year at the Office of the Insular Treasurer, then the ex-oficio insurance commissioner. He later joined the Insular Life Assurance Co. Ltd. in 1925 as its Actuary. He served as the first president of the Philippine Actuarial Society from 1954 to 1955.

Sevilla, on the other hand, is renowned for having the highest general weighted average (GWA) in the history of the University of the Philippines, with a GWA of flat 1.0.

He graduated summa cum laude in 1927 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce. He was later sent to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as a government scholar for a Master’s Degree in Actuarial Mathematics. He graduated in 1929.

He trained for one year with the United States Life Insurance Co. in New York. Upon his return to the

Wednesday, October 12, 2016 A11

Philippines, Sevilla worked as actuary in the Office of the Insurance Commission up to 1933 before transferring to National Life Insurance Co. At that time, there were only four actuaries in the Philippines. He also cofounded the Philippine Statistical Association in 1951. At National Life, he served as general manager and later as president in 1955. He passed away in 1985 at the age of 81.

The name Philippine Actuarial Society was later on changed to Actuarial Society of the Philippines in 1960. In 1969 it was formally incorporated before the Securities and Exchange Commission as a nonstock, nonprofit organization.

The society gave its first examinations for associateship (then a new designation) in 1969. Before 1969, it recognized membership in actuarial societies of other countries or required, for membership, college actuarial studies and actual work experience.

Before 1994, ASP gave six examinations of which the first three were for associateship. It covered the mathematical side of actuarial science and covered such topics as numerical analysis, compound interest, probability and statistics, life contingencies, risk theory, graduation and measurement of mortality. After 1994, associateship exams were replaced by examinations of the Society of Actuaries (SOA) over the same topics.

ASP continues to give fellowship examinations. Among the subjects covered are 10 specific courses: Valuation of Liabilities (Course 510), Life Insurance Accounting (Course 520), Investments and Finance

Foreign policy ‘recalibration’ Ernesto M. Hilario

ABOUT TOWN

W

here’s the country’s foreign policy headed after President Duterte’s widely reported diatribes against United States President Barack Obama, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the European Union?

We’re told by Mr. Duterte that

he’s going to pursue an independent foreign policy.

That, of course, is not a radical departure from what’s already contained in the 1987 Constitution. In the section on “State Policies”, we have this: “The Philippines shall pursue an independent foreign policy. In its relations with other states, the paramount consideration shall be national sovereignty, territorial integrity, national interest and the right to selfdetermination.”

In the “Declaration of Principles”, the country “renounces war as an instrument of national policy, adopts the generally accepted principles of international law as part of the law of the land and adheres to the policy of peace, equality, justice, freedom, cooperation and amity with all nations.”

President Duterte’s latest pronouncements indicate that our foreign policy would be less dependent on so-called special relations with the US and more open to expanded relations with two other powerful

states, China and Russia.

Of late, Mr. Duterte had threatened to downgrade ties with the US. He said he would ask the small US Special Forces contingent giving advice and technical assistance to government soldiers to leave Mindanao. Later, he said he would also put a stop to joint military exercises with American troops under the Visiting Forces Agreement and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement.

Does this mean that Mr. Duterte could, in a moment of extreme pique, even completely cut ties with the US? That’s appears unlikely at this point, if we’re to believe Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III, one of President Duterte’s trusted advisers.

The Duterte administration is simply “recalibrating” the country’s foreign policy, Dominguez said.

“I would not say the foreign policy is changing, I think it’s just being recalibrated so that we are more open to other markets,” that is, to take advantage of opportunities in countries other than our traditional trading partners.

Implicit in Mr. Duterte’s recent

not market-oriented, technologies, which can be farmed on a work for pay arrangement. We can learn from US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “who created 4 million jobs in a month’s time ” in the Great Depression of 1930s.

One such technology developed

by UP scientist Dr. Saturnina Halos is an extraction of microbial inoculants from the sturdy “cogon” grass and into an organic bio-fertilizer that increases yields of any crop from 15 percent to over 100 percent and saves on regular fertilizers by 50 percent.

It is also convenient to use with one 100-gram pack of the powdered product, which is mixed with water to

treat seeds and seedlings good for 1 hectare. Cogon is known for surviving without water and fertilizer as it can sequester nitrogen from the air for its nutrients, and can survive even on mountain dew (hamog) that condenses on its leaves. The product extracts from cogon are also good for tree planting as they reduce the current mortality rates.

Turned down by past administrations, in favor of inferior and more expensive technologies, Halos’s products have been exported to other Asian countries, which are benefiting from this Pinoy technology.

We must not rest on our laurels, but adopt better innovations copied

statement that he would strengthen ties with China and Russia is that he would consider buying weapons from the two powers to modernize the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and shore up the country’s external defense capabilities.

This, of course, would send alarm bells ringing in Washington, which has extended military, economic and humanitarian assistance to the country, especially since the end of the World War II. Can we really afford to cut our longstanding ties with the US?

Terror threat to get worse

HE isn’t telling us what his security advisers have already told him, but President Duterte, in one of his planned visits to various military camps and police offices, warned against a possible escalation of terrorist activities in the country, and asked the troops to monitor the situation and prepare to defend the country. We’re guessing that Mr. Duterte meant that the Abu Sayyaf and other smaller groups could have already established an alliance with the barbaric Islamic State (IS) as part of a grand design to establish a caliphate in this part of Asia.

President Duterte’s warning comes at basically the same time as Singapore Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen raised the dire prospect of increased terrorist activity in the region.

Following a recent meeting of Southeast Asia defense ministers with US Defense Secretary Ash Carter in Hawaii, Ng said over 1,000 Southeast Asians have flocked to join IS’s selfdeclared “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria.

“Every year we meet, the situation and threat from extremist terrorism

from us. We also need not reinvent the wheel as there are hundreds of technologies already developed that only have to be transferred locally.

In aquaculture, for instance, while our average tilapia production is only five to eight pieces per square meter of water, the technology abroad can now hit as many 250 to 500 pieces, in what is now called fish factories.

So why not mobilize the organizing skills of the Left, but be guided by learned experts and on technologies, to be matched by concessional financing facilities, like Bangko Sentral’s Credit Surety Fund for the poor. I believe it is through science

(Course 530), Selection of Risks and Reinsurance (Course 540), Preneed Plans (Course 550), Gross Premiums, Asset Shares and Other Pricing Considerations (Course 610), Retirement Plans (Course 620), Social Insurance (Course 630), Group Insurance and Health Benefit Systems (Course 640), and Life Insurance Law and Taxation (Course 650).

Other professional qualifying steps would include the Fellowship Admission Sessions (FAS), which includes topics on professional ethics and the professional credit point system.

To be an affiliate of ASP, a candidate must pass at least one of the five SOA preliminary exams. To be an associate, a candidate must pass all five preliminary exams, complete three Validation by Educational Experience (VEE) requirements and attend the Associateship Admission Course (AAC) offered by the ASP. To be a fellow, an associate must pass two fellowship exams and attend the FAS administered

by ASP. The associate must also complete the SOA Fundamentals of Actuarial Practice, at least two fellowship modules and at least one fellowship exam.

ASP also has a Code of Conduct, which is administered by its Professional Standards and Review Council, which was constituted in 1988.

From the time of its inception in 1953, ASP continues to be a pillar of the ever-growing Philippine insurance industry.

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

rises,” Ng said. “Compared to, say, a year or even two years ago, they’re more organized...they’re more networked, they’re more clear in their articulation of what they want to achieve.”

In June security officials said Southeast Asian militants claiming to be fighting for the IS said they had chosen one of the most wanted men in the Philippines to head a regional faction of the group. Authorities in the region have been on heightened alert since the IS admitted responsibility for an attack in Jakarta in January where eight people were killed, including four of the attackers.

A recent plot involved an Indonesian cell coordinated by an IS member in Syria that had planned to carry out an attack on hotels in Singapore’s Marina Bay area. The plot was foiled by Indonesian law enforcers. The terror threat in the country comes mainly from the Abu Sayyaf, which has been conducting kidnap-for-ransom activities and attacks on government troops mainly in Sulu and Basilan in Muslim Mindanao and several bombings in Metro Manila since the mid-1990s.

A few other smaller groups, such as the Maute Group and the Rajah Sulaiman Movement, are believed to be ideologically affiliated with the Abu Sayyaf.

They could link up with the IS—if they haven’t done so yet—and launch more terrorist activities in the years ahead.

If it’s true that a Filipino is now the leader of the Southeast Asian wing of the IS, the AFP and the police will certainly have to be on their toes as they could find themselves fighting another formidable enemy after the drug traffickers.

E-mail: ernhil@yahoo.com.

and technology that we can catch up by increasing the pie, by involving the poor themselves, who are thus assured of a slice of the pie.

You cannot reduce poverty by increasing wages, or hiring more unproductive people in the government, or illegally confiscating property the communist way. It is also only by increasing production substantially, through better technologies involving the poor, that you can employ the poor massively, and with more production, prices of food and other commodities, likewise, drop, making them affordable to the poor.

E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com

2nd Front Page BusinessMirror

A12

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

D.O.E. READIES AUDIT OF POWER PLANTS AND DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM FACILITIES

By Lenie Lectura

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@llectura

he Department of Energy (DOE) is soliciting comments from industry stakeholders on a draft circular that requires the conduct of a technical audit for all power generation and distribution system facilities in the country.

The agency deemed it necessary to institutionalize a regular compliance assessment following the frequent yellow- and red-alert incidents between July 25 and August 5 this year.

“The DOE noted the increasing and frequent occurrences of forced and unplanned outages, particularly of large base-load power plants, based on the reports of the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines, resulting to issuances of yellow- and red-alert notices that may lead to supply shortfall and, possibly, rotating brownouts,” the agency said in its draft circular.

In the proposed circular, the DOE directs the conduct of overall performance audit, or technical audit, for all power generation and distribution facilities.

The circular added that proposed audit would “encroach or step in the authority of the ERC,” but, at the same time, “shall serve as basis for DOE’s future policies

instrumental to the attainment of the primary goal of Epira [Electric Power Industry Reform Act] particularly in ensuring the security, reliability and affordability of the supply of electric power.”

The proposed circular shall apply to all generation companies owning and/or operating generation facilities in Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao, both in the main grid and off-grid areas; and all distribution utilities operating a distribution system in the country.

Their overall performance, including the compliance to laws, permits and licenses issued to them, will be evaluated. Likewise, the audit intends to remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies that cause disruptions in the power supply. Further, the audit intends to identify effective systems of penalties and incentives to encourage greater efficiencies and improve performance of generation companies and distribution utilities.

To assist in the implementation of the technical audits, the DOE proposed the creation of Task Force Performance Audit on Power Generation Facilities (TFPA-PGF), to be headed by the National Transmission Corp., and the Task Force Performance Audit on Distribution System Facilities (TFPA-DSF), to be headed by the National Electrification Administration.

The DOE noted the increasing and frequent occurrences of forced and unplanned outages, particularly of large base-load power plants, based on the reports of the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines, resulting to issuances of yellow- and red-alert notices that may lead to supply shortfall and, possibly, rotating brownouts.”—DOE circular

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Trade deficit nearly doubled in August

T

By Catherine N. Pillas

@c_pillas29

he Philippines’s trade deficit in August nearly doubled to $2.02 billion, from $1.04 billion recorded a year ago, according to the latest data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).

Data from the PSA showed that the country’s import bill in August continued to outpace revenues from exports during the period.

In August PSA data showed that export revenues in August declined by 4.4 percent to $4.9 billion, from $5.12 billion recorded a year ago.

In contrast, the country’s import payments rose by 12.2 percent to $6.927 billion in August, from $6.17 billion posted in the same period last year.

“The increase in [imports] was due to the positive growth rates of seven out of the top 10 major imported commodities for the month, led by transport equipment,” the PSA said.

The National Economic and Development Authority (Neda)

$2.02B The country’s trade deficit in August

said the country’s purchases of consumer goods from abroad grew by 59 percent, while payments for imported capital goods expanded by 29.9 percent.

Also, products of neighboring Asian economies drove up the country’s import payment. Hefty increases in imports from Indonesia, Thailand, China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and India were observed.

As for the country’s merchandise exports, Neda Deputy Director General Rosemarie G. Edillon noted that revenues from commodity groups, like manufactures, agro-based products and petroleum products, declined in August.

“Given the sluggish external environment, the country should focus on diversifying its export markets and improving productivity and competitiveness of industries,” Edillon said.

“With traditional export markets, such as Japan and the United States, still showing weak appetite for Philippine exports, new markets should be explored,” she added.

Edillon said Filipino traders could consider tapping new markets, such as Russia and Kazakhstan, which are being eyed as potential destinations for agriculture and industrial products. She said Kuwait, Mongolia and Malaysia are also potential markets for Philippine products.

“We also need to shift to highvalue crops as potential agricultural exports. This can be done if we improve agricultural productivity through investments in modernization efforts, infrastructure and research,” she said.

DOT working to boost arrivals in Negros Occ.

By Ma. Stella F. Arnaldo

@Pulitika2010 Special to the BusinessMirror

B

ACOLOD CITY, the capital of Negros Occidental, may have a lot more to smile about, as the Department of Tourism (DOT) said it was working to attract more tourists to the city and its neighboring areas.

Tourism Assistant Secretary for Administration and Special Concerns Gwen Cads-Javier promised more projects would be implemented in the province, according to a news statement from the agency.

“These projects include infrastructure along destination routes, ecotourism, agri-aqua tourism, adventure, riverboat tours and international cruise tourism in Bacolod, Silay, Talisay and Bago,” she added.

Aside from the yearly Masskara Festival in Bacolod, tourists flock to Negros Occidental for its unique culinary offerings, as well as its well-maintained heritage homes.

Javier also encouraged local tourism establishments to get accredited with DOT Region 6 (Western Visayas) to assure tourists of world-class standards.

Meanwhile, she lauded the local tourism sector, as well as the Bacolod City Council, for the successful staging of the Masskara Festival, which has become one of the most popular tourism events that attract foreign and domestic tourists.

Bacolod, also known as the “City of Smiles”, is currently hosting its 37th MassKara Festival, with Pres-

Oil production. . .

Continued from A1

So far this month, Russia has pumped crude and a light oil, called condensate, at a rate of 11.2 million barrels a day, according to preliminary data from the Energy Ministry’s CDU-TEK unit. If that continued for the whole month, it would set a post-Soviet

Cads-Javier: “These projects include infrastructure along destination routes, ecotourism, agri-aqua tourism, adventure, riverboat tours and international cruise tourism in Bacolod, Silay, Talisay and Bago.”

ident Duterte, gracing the event’s opening ceremonies on October 2. It was the first time a sitting President has ever attended the event’s opening.

“I had visited Bacolod when I was mayor of Davao City. I believe Masskara has evolved into one of the more colorful festivities in the country. It has its own identity different from other festivals,” Mr. Duterte said.

With almost 5,000 hotel rooms fully booked in Bacolod, rough estimates of tourists attending the Masskara Festival run to about 10,000 to 15,000. About 7,000 people were reported to have attended the opening ceremonies alone.

Conceived as a way to celebrate Negros Occidental’s continued blessings amid hardships that struck the sugar industry in the 1980s, the Masskara Festival has been recognized by international news network CNN as “One of the 12 Best Things to Do in the Philippines,” while the National Geographic proclaimed it as “One of the 10 Must-Do Festivals for the Month of October in the World.”

During the festival, a grand parade is usually held where parrecord, beating September’s 11.1 million barrels a day. Russia would prefer to freeze its output at current levels rather than make reductions, Energy Minister Alexander Novak said earlier Monday in Istanbul.

For the Algiers production deal to work, Saudi Arabia would need to make some cuts. The kingdom pumped 10.58 million barrels of crude a day in

ticipants don colorful masks and dance. The festival will last until October 23.

“The Masskara Festival reflects our never-ending spirit of optimism. We anticipate the festival for more color, pageantry and excitement. The festival has, likewise, become an occasion to reminisce and to reunite as a people here and from other countries,” Bacolod City Mayor Evelio Leonardia said.

The news statement also said “travel and tour operators, hoteliers, restaurateurs and community leaders joined officials of DOT, as well as local government unit officials in affirming their support for the government’s ‘tourism-for-all’ program, spearheaded by Tourism Secretar y Wanda Corazon T. Teo.” During the festivities, industry stakeholders pledged “not only to work for the benefit of the poor rural folk but to make tourism more accessible to persons with disability, handicapped, elderly and pregnant women.”

In 2015 Negros Occidental recorded 1.16 million visitor arrivals, mostly domestic tourists, 6.45 percent lower than the 1.24 million arrivals in 2014. The province placed second to Aklan (1.73 million) in terms of the number of visitors in the Western Visayas region in 2015. In third spot was Iloilo, at 1.06 million visitor arrivals, followed by Capiz, at 163,212 tourists; Guimaras, at 94,315; and Antique, at 50,166. Total visitor arrivals in Western Visayas reached 4.3 million in 2015, up 8 percent from 2014.

September, just shy of its July record of 10.66 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Brent prices reached a one-year high of $53.73 a barrel in London on Monday. Both Saudi Arabia’s Al-Falih and Bob Dudley, the CEO of BP Plc., said oil prices of about $60 a barrel by year-end are possible.

Bloomberg News