Hi, Welcome to my new blog

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Hi Readers,

I created this new blog that is focused on government budget/expenditures and taxes/revenues. Naturally topics on budget deficit, public debt, subsidies, privatization and related topics will be tackled.

I will start with reposting my old columns in BusinessWorld on the subject. The numbers in "BWorld __" means it's my __th article in the newspaper.

Hope you will like this blog. Thank you.

Bienvenido "Nonoy" Oplas Jr.

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Top 10 economic news stories of 2023

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Top 10 economic news stories of 2023 December 28, 2023 | 12:02 am My Cup Of Liberty By Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr. https://www.bworldonline.com/opinion/2023/12/28/565683/top-10-economic-news-stories-of-2023/ Merry Christmas, dear readers. This piece is toast to the great economic performance of the Philippines despite an unwieldy and worsening global economic environment. For the purposes of brevity, we are covering only three important indicators — GDP growth, the unemployment rate, and the inflation rate. Countries covered in this analysis are those that the IMF projects as having GDP size at purchasing power parity (PPP) values for 2023 of at least $700 billion. These are also the top 40 largest economies in the world. Two countries among the top 40, Pakistan and Bangladesh, have no quarterly GDP growth data, so are not included. These are the top 10 economic stories and trends based on these indicators and data. 1. India, Iran, the Philippines, China, and Indonesia (all Asian countrie...
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GDP expansion and an irrational lobby

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*  BusinessWorld , April 19, 2023. ------------- Last week, the country’s economic team went to Washington DC to hold the Philippine Economic Briefing (PEB) and joined meetings with multilateral agencies and corporate investors and lenders. The economic team has one important goal — to attract more investments and create more businesses and jobs here as more liberal economic policies are implemented. Also last week, the IMF released the World Economic Outlook (WEO) 2023. I was curious about the economic expansion of the Philippines and other countries over the past four decades, so I checked the database and got the excel file. I show here different countries’ gross domestic product (GDP) size, both nominal (current GDP values in national currency multiplied by average exchange rate with the US$) and by purchasing power parity (PPP) values, which attempts to remove price level differences of goods and services between countries. In PPP values of GDP, China overtook the US in 2016 w...
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The SC on Meralco rate hike, Bidenflation and Peso depreciation

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* My column in  BusinessWorld  last July 11. -------------- ... It is good that the SC has realized the mistake it made eight years ago and upheld the electricity rate hike. Good decision. And I hope that the SC will avoid the same problem of price intervention in the future, whether in electricity, food, transportation, and other sectors. BIDENFLATION, NOT PUTINFLATION There is a continuing narrative that the high inflation in the US, Europe, and rest of the world is “Putin caused” via Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February. This is not true; this is a dishonest narrative. The truth is that from January 2021 to January 2022, 12 months of US President Joseph R. Biden’s being in power and prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the inflation rates in the US and Europe had been rising fast (Table 2). I arranged the countries into four groups: A is North America, B is Europe, C is North Asia, and D is ASEAN. Other countries do not have June 2022 inflation numbers yet as of ...
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