THIS IS NOT THE TIME, THE reasoning goes, to be demanding accountability for corruption and abuse of power, when the economy is doing well and growth is on the uptrend.

We cannot afford to rock the boat all over again with issues of corruption and questions on the government’s legitimacy, and risk losing the economic gains we have already made, they say.

Palace defenders would even declare it to be pure folly to ask for the resignation of the President who has given us 24 quarters of uninterrupted growth, as if that would be tantamount to getting rid of our very savior.

I feel sad whenever I hear such sentiments expressed, as if the performance of the economy was the paramount concern to which everything else—including truth, justice and righteousness—must be subordinated.

It reflects, to my mind, both faulty priorities and faulty premises on the part of those who say so.

Faulty priorities

Two years ago, I lamented in this column when a market analyst declared that our political leaders should be devoting 80 percent of their attention to the economy, and only 20 percent to the search for truth and accountability.

To me, it reflected the kind of misplaced priorities and shortsightedness that lead people to the above reasoning.

I asserted then, as I continue to assert now, that an economy not built on a foundation of truth and justice is fundamentally weak. Without truth and wide respect for it, any economic gains are illusory and transitory, as the economy stands on shaky ground, and only builds pressure into the simmering social volcano.

One would think that people in business who like to mouth the above line of economy before truth should be among the first to realize this.

Or is it a fact that shortsightedness is an all-too-common affliction of Filipino business people (let alone politicians)? Could this be the reason why our economy failed to achieve the sustained dynamism shown by our neighboring economies in past decades?

And yet anyone in business must realize that for an economy to flourish and stay that way, contracts must be enforced and respected, transactions must be transparent, the playing field must be level, and rent-seeking must give way to fair competition. The economy, in short, must be built on honesty and hard work.

Faulty premises

Many also question the very premise of those who continue to mouth the economy-before-truth line, i.e., that the economy is doing well and we should therefore not rock the boat. This is not to deny that there are manifestations of improvement in the economy seen in the official data.

Notwithstanding serious questions he raises on our GDP/GNP growth data, my friend and fellow economist Philip Medalla still concludes that growth of the Philippine economy has been picking up in recent years.

It may be overstated by one or two percentage points—that is, it would be more like 5.3 to 6.3 percent rather than the reported 7.3 percent if measured in a way that would make recent data comparable to the pre-2004 data. (It is a fact that pre-2004 economic growth data are not comparable with post-2004 data, as the government had changed the methodology of measurement—and the National Statistical Coordination Board makes no secret of this.) Still, this does not change the fact that GDP growth has accelerated in recent years.

The issue, though, is not about the quantity of growth, but rather the quality of that growth.

As widely lamented, we have been witnessing a growth that has not filtered down to the lower levels of society. Even my friend, Albay Governor Joey Salceda, seen by many as the de facto chief economic adviser of the President, admits to losing sleep over the unmistakable drop in real incomes of the middle and lower classes in recent years, as clearly evidenced by the highly-reliable Family Income and Expenditures Survey (FIES).

Our recent economic growth has been achieved at their expense—and that is why Salceda and the President are now talking of the need for “social rebalancing”—a nice term for giving direct income transfers to the poor and middle classes.

Wrong attribution

Is this the kind of economic momentum people say is worth preserving, then? The big businesses who have lately been reporting hefty profits would say yes, obviously—but I’d expect a different answer from the wide majority who have actually seen their real incomes decline in recent years.

But even granting that the news is indeed good, is it really the government that we ought to thank for that? If the inflation rate has been low—i.e., prices have been more stable (although I keep getting reader mail disputing that)—we have the weak dollar and our OFWs to thank for that, for raising the value of the peso.

If the unemployment rate has gone down recently (i.e., to 6.3 percent from last year’s 7.3 percent), it’s not because our growing economy generated that many new jobs, but because a lot of working-age Filipinos have stopped looking for jobs, and are thus not counted as part of the labor force.

And it appears again that our OFWs are to be thanked for that to a large extent, as their remittances have been observed by researchers to have led to a disturbing dependency syndrome among their dependents left behind at home.

In short, if we are seeing positive developments in the economy, it is all in spite of, rather than because of our current leadership. We deserve, and could attain, much better.

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The next Ateneo Eagle Watch Economic and Political Briefing, featuring Gov. Joey Salceda as special guest, will be on the morning of Feb. 20 at the Ateneo Rockwell campus. Call Guia Janson at 9297970 or e-mail majen83@gmail.com for inquiries and reservations. Comments are welcome at chabito@ateneo.edu.