An endless cycle of debt
The Philippines' worsening debt burden is rooted in its neocolonial, backward, unindustrialized and bankrupt condition. The country continues to incur losses in neocolonial trade, and must therefore keep on borrowing to make up for such deficits.
The crisis of oversupply and depressed prices of raw materials and traditional agricultural products (sugar, timber and copra, among others) in the global market began to intensify since the latter part of the 1970s.
Since the late 1980s, the crisis of oversupply of semimanufactured goods (electronic parts and garments, among others) worsened. The implementation of the imperialist "globalization" policy, especially the liberalization of trade and investments, has exacerbated this condition since the advent of the 1990s. The Philippines has become an even bigger dumping ground for the surplus goods of imperialists, and this has wrought havoc on local industrial and agricultural production and further destroyed the country's productive forces.
The Asian financial crisis of 1997 crippled the Philippine economy by bursting the bubble of speculative capital. This resulted in a massive financial crisis that gripped other countries in Asia and Latin America as well. With no recovery as yet in sight from previous crises, an intense recession in the centers of capitalism followed. The US and especially the backward countries still suffer from this recession.
The country and the global capitalist system's economic trajectory indicates the impending outbreak of an even graver financial crisis and the Philippine economy's further inundation in a sea of debt in the coming years.
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