Do global, economic, and political integrations bring more harm to the Philippines and the Filipinos, or

not?

Stance: Yes

Always at our Fundamental Expense: The Back-burnered Business of Economic and Political
Integrations in the Philippines

Accelerating economic and political opportunities from which developing countries have been
left out of, integrations with advanced and neighboring countries have been the clear route for foreign
policy. The Philippines, being an element of colonization for centuries, has taken it upon itself to
rehabilitate from this delay by joining into organizations such as the ASEAN to draw investors from
whom domestic opportunities will be created and developed best fit for international standards of
globalization and trade. However, in the process of these political and economic integrations, many forms
of national interest are compromised. This paper argues that while transnational economic and political
integrations have spurred parametric evidence towards increased national capacity, the globalistic
interplay from over which these initiatives have networked around has, in fact, brought more harm
than good to the Philippines and to the welfare of its citizen Filipinos.

Filipino labor, as the primary backbone of the country’s domestic lived experience and welfare,
has been at the undisputable frontline against international investments by being subjected as a
cost-effective and economically sound capital of their investments. While evidence has shown that most
contractual workers are benefiting from increased and growing global trade, there has been friction
towards increasing global integration and the “loose” attitude of international investors as it pushes wages
down to maximize and stretch economic output and activity. Generally, corporations, especially those
faring from the Western market, have been attracted to countries with high labor standards rather than low
ones. In developing nations, items made with trained labor should become more affordable, while in
industrialized nations, goods made with unskilled labor should see a similar trend. The proportionate
decrease in the earnings of unskilled workers cannot be attributed to this later effect, which appears too
minor. Moreover, a shift in production structure between industries is how the argument from the theory
of international commerce functions. But in the North, adjustments within sectors rather than those
between sectors have mostly been responsible for changes in employment structure towards skilled labor.
Prompted by these corporate demands, the Filipino labor work is harnessed effectively by multinational
investments while rewarding them way less remains acceptable because it is relative to the country’s
economic preconditions of minimum wage and work benefits.

Jobs surplus has always been the convenient defense of economic integrations, as it would
stimulate economic activity in invested regions. To report one, the Philippines added 3.1 million jobs to
its labor market as it entered as a member of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), coming into
force last 2015. All the while, the country still needed to improve skills and social protection to make the
most of the single market; otherwise, there is a risk of worsening poverty. Significant job growth has also
been a result of globalization. The most noticeable aspect of this creation is linked to export processing
zones and, more specifically, foreign direct investment. The latter is frequently described as enclosed
industrial parks with a focus on export-oriented production that provide a free-trade environment and lax
regulatory standards. The best way to integrate a nation with international markets is to provide free trade
and an open regulatory environment everywhere. Bottom line: there are jobs when countries are
economically integrated with each other. The question whether each of these jobs are well-paying is
another. Despite this, it still can be inferred that while negotiations leading to economic integrations with
originally regionalistic labor groups have been stirred towards increasing employee and worker
purchasing power, its policies still fall short to being far-reaching and inclusive with those that constitute
the massive majority that are yet to necessarily register contributory roles in the economy. Aggravated by
the inept coverage brought about by supposing foreign investors that pursue economic integration, many
Filipinos are rather being moved to adjust for the systemic changes, whether social or monetary, so that
they can help themselves get by against moving market trends and shifts in opportunities. This is because
despite the fact that the process of political integration intends to uplift different state subjects
collectively, in forms of unionized manpower and economic services, the tendency of a country whose
positioned more disadvantageous than the rest is that they only participate into these global organizations
to prioritize the well-being and to advance the interests of all its subjects on a broader arena, whereas
developing countries can only get the lower hand.

Similar to the exploitative manner that cheap labor opportunities provide in the Philippines, as a
byproduct of integration, one of the most pivotal effects of it redirect back to the issue of migration. This
relates to global events that have enhanced international migration opportunities for Filipinos, especially
by expanding the workplace globally. For example, the 1970s adopted a more liberal immigration policy.
The 1973 oil crisis spurred the rise of the Gulf region as a temporary migrant worker destination. The rise
of newly industrialized countries in East and Southeast Asia that spurred additional demand for migrant
workers in the 1980s. And all of globalization has resulted in a global demand for a skilled and
specialized workforce. Finally, labor migration was explained by so-called contagious migration. This
indicates an increasing interest in immigration as immigration increases. This now seems to be a social
construct ingrained in Filipino culture. For example, migration appears to be passed from generation to
generation within families. In many developed nations, the demand for foreign labor has increased due to
shifting economic and demographic trends. The number of insecure jobs, which migrants frequently fill,
is growing as a result of aging populations, an aging labor force, a decline in the number of young people
joining the workforce, and the continuation of parallel labor markets. Many small and medium-sized
businesses and labor-intensive industries aim to contain labor costs by recruiting migrants instead of
relocating abroad, such that the demand for foreign labor reflects the long-term trend of degrading or
further informalizing employment that is already low-skilled and poorly paid. Because there is an
extension of free trade from just tangible goods to all economic resources, Filipinos, as human and labor
resources, may just be equated and treated under par, being taken for granted commercially without safety
nets just like all other goods. This imitates what we call exploitation.

Counterintuitively, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development claimed that
“The country would benefit from further strengthening its whole-of-government approach to making
migration an integral part of its overall development strategies.”, citing the country’s economic prowess in
providing overseas employment opportunities at the same time heavy-hitting on their migrant protection
and networking to the embassy. Remittances to the Philippines are huge, accounting for 10% of the Gross
Domestic Product (GDP), and according to IPPMD's data and analysis, this income is mainly invested in
education. However, the use of remittances for productive investment appears to be limited in the
Philippines. The precipitate of this still circles back as to whether this oversea economic arm of the
country indeed still contributes to the speeding of our stakes in the international arena, or this leeches off
rather from the strained economic disadvantage of value discrepancy between the Peso and the Dollar. At
worst, the economic integration may in fact be on the country’s disadvantage because instead of luring
foreign investors in, our own citizens get lured by the opportunities presented in their own homelands.
This is its unfortunate flipside. Going beyond the framework of intra-regional commerce and regional
integration and studying other structural variables or situations that permit migration to have a beneficial
impact on wages in receiving nations are some advantages of labor migration. The relationship between
labor migration and wages, as well as how business firms' and companies' competitiveness and the
environment's favorable conditions at the national level support competitiveness and permit a favorable
effect of immigration on salaries. Examining whether an open migration policy would permit wage
increases in labor-receiving countries if more competitive businesses existed and a favorable business
environment allows us to improve firm competitiveness and study economic integration.

While economic integration deliberately cascades into the welfare of Filipinos, whether it might
be beneficial or inimical to their interests, political integration, on the other hand, manifests into the belief
system and outlook on governance and leadership, from which supposedly Filipinos and their welfare, of
course, could have gotten a positive steering from. On an analysis between ASEAN countries, Brunei
Darussalam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore were on the frontier corruption controin in 1996,
whereas Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Thailand, and Vietnam fell well below the estimated efficiency
frontier. A marked deterioration in the performance of Malaysia and the Philippines was seen as of 2009.
At the same time, the efficiency score in the Philippines fell far below the world average, which was used
as a benchmark threshold to demarcate countries either on or off the efficiency frontier. This suggests that
while third-world countries feel slights improvement in their corruption indexes over time as a result of
political integration from global neoliberal influences, they have got to get benefited politically overall as
there is a lack of underpinning to support reforms from the smallest domestic governmental units for the
best interest of international game players.

While there has been undisputable inflictions to domestic governing styles, admittedly, robust
governance measures for the developed economies of Australia, Japan, Korea, and New Zealand start to
reflect among other international models. An analysis by the World Bank entitled “Aggregate Governance
Indicators 1996–2009" highlights a potentially crucial policy question regarding the extent to which
heightened regional cooperation could generate positive governance spillover effects across countries.
Hypothetically, many ASEAN countries would be major beneficiaries, if such a larger regional
cooperation framework aimed at improving and converging national governance standards across the
expanded group of 'club' members. It seems to me, however, that the prospect of good international
governing models influencing the country without much endogenous reforms is far from guaranteed, and
lacks political pragmatism. At best, such a spillover event to spur political integration that would benefit
Filipinos is one that is only perched on parliamentary inspiration.

More than parliamentary stagnancy and corruption and local machine strength incapacity notions,
where political integration inflicts the most collateral is at the expense of bottom-up thriving political
participation. In the interests of an array of interstate developers, local clientelist structures become
weaker with urbanization and social mobilization, especially the lower- and middle-class that are less and
less integrated into the public hearings involved in multi-conditional policymaking. Because settlers
allowed only limited participation, the regionalistic or local sentiments of the local population played little
role in key decisions of crucial importance to policy makers. It is difficult to find and keep good
employees in these conditions since they will look for work or depart to accept more difficult and
lucrative positions in the private sector or abroad. Therefore, where such circumstances exist in a country,
careful and severe consideration should be given to a more comprehensive civil service reform program,
including adjusting salaries to cover the living expenses of an average family when inflationary
expectations have been brought under control.As soon as they allow, the integration demands on your
system are higher. The new nation's new elites have higher national integration standards than their
previous colonial rulers, which also poses new integration problems. This becomes dangerous for the
minorities in the Philippines that have got to get a sentiment running in a project that may have already
been subjected to corporate oversight, in partnership with the government.

In contrast, there also is evidence to which political integration revitalized political participation,
in the form of voter turnout. Highly competitive electoral politics may have begun to break the isolation
of Muslim voters from the political process. Local government solidarity is clearly under pressure from
the electoral race. The fact that multiple Muslim candidates are running from the same constituency
shows that the Muslim community does not function as a monolithic political entity; therefore, the
dependence of those seeking choice on the support of communities other than their own broadens their
horizons and broadens their purpose, thus facilitating the slow integration of their communities into
emerging secular societies. Among immigrants, similarly, social and political integration have had
apparent boostings of voter turnout; at the same time, this can also be viewed negatively as citizens, in
shifts brought about by political integrations, may now need to participate in government structures that
they were originally not constituents in. In spite of this, we know this is not the case for the Philippines
because political participation being otherwise discouraged is what we have seen already in
mega-infrastructure projects that employed integration with international companies and organizations.

Therefore, determining which channel is the most important is not the main concern. It is rather to
evaluate how the complete package will affect the job market. Globalization puts pressure on developing
country governments to implement domestic reforms to boost their economies' competitiveness. A
common component of the "package" of globalization is allowing competition in utilities or privatization
state-owned businesses. A wide range of government interventions have been explored, and the lessons
discovered in one nation may apply to another. The goal of several of these interventions is to aid
employees in adjusting to job loss. Others could be applied to cut back on the negative effects of
globalization on some classes of households and workers. The potential decline in the wages of unskilled
workers, the use of child labor in export-oriented industries, and the potential for increased volatility in
employment and wages due to terms-of-trade fluctuations and short-term capital movements are just a
few of the adverse effects that could result. If economic and political integration would have been
operated from ideal hands where individual national interests are not orchestrated and designed to
advance their own interests even at the expense of the other, perhaps, the process should continue. If
anything, political and economic integration should, at best, be inclusive in labor, migration, governance,
and political participation so as to not only benefit the elite few. But, the truth is: it remains to be that way
because integrations are profit-driven and by default, already partial to their national agendas. This is
why, by most practical means and with direct observation to its recorded incapacity to reverse poverty
rates in the lived experience of the poor which is the overwhelming majority of this country, there is
undeniably more and more reason to halt and to disengage. Even more, this is feverishly important to
consider when the country is in the zero sum after all proposals have already been entertained.
Integrations look viable in already competitive states, but in the Philippines, where Filipinos can be at the
losing ends when dealt with poorly, the way to go is to strengthen national democracy and domestic
democracy. Against collaborative game playing where signs of progress trickling down to ordinary
Filipino preconditions have been back-burnered, this is the individual risk we are left to take – slow but
all the while guaranteed.

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