Another Libya?
| AN OUTSIDERS VIEW |
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| Ken Fuller |
In the recent dispute concerning what might have happened if Ferdinand Marcos had not been deposed in 1986, President Aquino is reported to have said that the Philippines would have become another Libya. But if Libya is such a basket case, one struggles to understand the presence there of tens of thousand of OFWs. Did all those Filipinos really choose to work in a country where conditions were worse than in their own?
A piece by David Rothscum (“The World Cheers as the CIA Plunges Libya into Chaos”) on Global Reseach provides some clarification. Libya, he says, has the lowest infant mortality rate and the highest life expectancy rate in Africa. As food prices rose, the Libyan government eliminated all food taxes. The proportion of the population described as malnourished is less than five percent.
“Libya,” says Rothscum, has “the highest gross domestic product… at purchasing power parity… of all of Africa,” and “the highest Human Development Index of any country on the continent... In Libya, a lower percentage of people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.”
This outsider could be wrong, but it seems to me that many Filipinos would probably settle for something like that..... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110308com5.html
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