The Philippines in 2009: The Fourth-Quarter Collapse

The Year of the Fourth-Quarter Collapse

One of the most incongruous characteristics of Philippine society is the popularity of basketball among a people not noted for their height. The greater interest is in the professional game which is played in quarters rather than according to the amateur rule of dividing the game into two halves. To the Filipino fan, nothing evokes a greater thrill than the fourth-quarter rally, a situation where nothing that the favoured team does can go wrong and allows it to catch up with and surpass the score of the opposing team in the span of the last twelve minutes of the game. Moves are executed perfectly, a very high percentage of the shots go in, loose balls generally end up in or near the hands of their players, and close calls by the referee favour them. In other words, the hard work and skill of the players combined with good luck allow the favoured team to make up for what had generally been bad first three quarters to, as the cliché goes, snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Conversely, the most dismaying development for the fan would be a situation where their favoured team has built a comfortable lead through three very competently played quarters but is suddenly unable to do anything right to protect the hard-earned lead in the last. The fourth-quarter collapse is a syndrome that has affected even the very best teams. Teams with the most disciplined and highly trained and skilled players can find themselves in situations where nothing works in the fourth quarter, and end up handing over to the opposing team what looked in the first part of the game like certain victory.

The analogy of the fourth-quarter collapse is a way of describing the Philippines in 2009. The end of 2008 did not give much room for confidence. There was concern about how the Philippines would cope with the long-term effects of the global financial crisis. There were projections of overseas Filipino workers being laid off and forced to come back to the country. Not only would the volume of remittances upon which the Philippine economy had become so reliant diminish, it would also intensify the expected effects of the financial crisis on the unemployment situation. As the country headed into the second half of 2009, these concerns were largely muted, if not completely silenced, and in fact gave way to some degree of optimism as government efforts at keeping the economy stable (including a stimulus package that promised to increase the country's total debt) took effect. It also helped that reforms in the financial system initiated in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis and the fiscal policies enforced by Central Bank Governor Amando Tetangco enabled the Philippine financial system to weather the storm of the global crisis. And to a certain extent, the situation was also helped by the promise of change on the political horizon with scheduled presidential elections in 2010. As the country typically muddled through the first half of 2009, there was an increasing level of confidence that the country's prospects for the rest of the year would not hold any real unpleasant surprises. Even as there were still rumblings within the House of Representatives of possible moves for constitutional change, and dire warnings from the political opposition on the possibility of elections being discontinued because of the machinations of the administration in power, there was a sense that the country was moving slowly forward.

The extensive damage and hundreds of deaths caused by the onset of tropical storm Ketsana (locally referred to as Ondoy) towards the end of the third quarter, and the entry of Super Typhoon Parma (locally Pepeng) in the second week of October, however, changed the country's situation drastically. Their effects highlighted the vulnerabilities of a society whose government, across different administrations, had constantly taken politically-easy short-term action in the face of an inability to harness the political will to push needed...