Growing Old Before Becoming Rich

Growing Old Before Becoming Rich - Manila Bulletin, October 28, 2010
...Thailand's GDP grew much faster than that of the Philippines because of the very enlightened policies of its leaders - inspired by a king with a magnificent obsession for agriculture - of endowing its countryside with excellent infrastructures, e.g. farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems, post-harvest facilities, etc. As early as the 1980s, there was no small farm in the most remote areas of Thailand that was not within one kilometer from a good road. During that same period, we were still obsessed with inward-looking, import-substitution, ultranationalistic industrialization which dragged our economy down to become the "sick man of Asia in the mid-1980s. Thailand made its farmers rich by providing them with efficient infrastructures. Our farmers got poorer and poorer (70 percent of the poor in the Philippines are in the rural areas)...