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Banks are only for the rich

For the last half of 2012, I was desperate to find a decent bank willing to lend me money to finish my house at an interest rate that I can afford.   My wife, another Certified Public Accountant in the house besides myself, went through an options analysis including the Home Development Mutual Fund (HDMF) and a few commercial banks that promise interest holidays, or low interest rates, or fast processing and so on and so forth.   She found out that when one borrows from HDMF at an amount beyond Php750,000, the interest rates converge with that of commercial banks so we decided to apply a housing loan from both PS Bank and Bank of Commerce .   The experience was not that pleasant.   Both banks were slow at responding to request for information and failed several times to get back to us as to the status of our applications.   PS Bank, for example, treats us as miserable clients, not worthy to be lent some money despite our positive and highly liquid cash position, because our acc

A City Left to Rot

Travelling within Tagbilaran City is such a trouble and a great discomfort that I would rather stay at home than go somewhere else.   If I have a choice, I wouldn’t go to the city centre where the banks are located or report to my office at Step Up Consulting Services.   It would seem that as I drive, I can hear the shriek and the cry of the poor car coupled sometimes with my son’s loud “ouch” when I hit a pothole large enough to have his head banged against the windows. Every person who lives in Tagbilaran City will understand when I say that Tagbilaran nowadays seems like a city left to rot.   I highlight three reasons below why I say so. POINT 1 .   Tagbilaran roads are outrageously bad , the streets within the city center are dirty caused by mud on rainy days or by dust when the sun is out.   If you live somewhere in Janssen Heights and would like to go to the St. Joseph Cathedral, you can never have a smooth ride except when you travel through the Dampas-Mansasa Road down

How do you help the Boholano farmer?

Since economic reforms started to be implemented in developing countries in the 1980s, there has been a vigorous debate over the nature of the changes brought by market liberalisation and de-regulation, and over their results. As the debates over ‘getting the prices right’ and ‘appropriate incentives’ subsided by the early 1990s, the discussion moved towards, on one hand, the discussion of the role of globalisation in economic restructuring, and, on the other hand, of issues of institution building and good governance. Generally, the literature has focused on issues either at the international, regional, national or sectoral levels. While these debates have generated key insights, relatively little has been said on commodity-specific dynamics of change and on the possibilities (and the limitations) of economic upgrading for developing countries offered by specific markets. In local economies as Bohol, while there were a lot of discussions and interventions in the sphere of agr

(De)constructing Development: Political Spaces and Geographical Boundaries in Tourism Planning

 Undated aerial photo of Alona Beach, from www.alonabeach.co . I was reminded of tourism planning, as an aspect of the climate change debate, when I attended a conference on Climate Change and Development Policy in Helsinki last 28-29 September 2012 at the invitation of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research.   One of the sessions highlighted the need to decongest spaces and make towns and cities compact for purposes of energy efficiency, carbon footprint reduction, and climate change mitigation, recognizing that cities than the rural places, are the largest emitters of carbon dioxide.   While the argument was done in the context of cities, I believe it is also applicable to the pseudo-cities, or those I call spaces where the characteristic of cities (population density and intense requirements of sanitation, utilities, housing, and transportation) are prevalent and where there is a need to ensure that proper planning and development