[In This Economy] Sadly, there’s no ICC to try Duterte’s ‘economic crimes’

Nearly nine years since he took office as president of the Philippines and his war on drugs started, Rodrigo Roa Duterte has been finally arrested for the charge of “crime against humanity of murder.”

As of writing, Duterte is already at the detention center of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. At 9 pm Friday, March 14 (Philippine time), Duterte is set to appear for the first time before the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber 1.

At long last, Duterte will face justice and answer for the estimated 30,000 people killed during the war on drugs during his presidency. It’s a cathartic moment for the country, and especially the loved ones of victims of extrajudicial killings (EJKs). Many of these stories were documented in Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing.

But unfortunately, Duterte may never be held liable for his mismanagement of the Philippine economy, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At first, one might think that economic mismanagement pales in comparison to the deaths of thousands of people in EJKs. But economic mismanagement results in real hardships for millions of people, in the form of unemployment, lower income, hunger, and poverty. The effects could also be felt well into the future, when mismanagement pulls down the economy’s trajectory.

Consider the harsh economic facts that many may already have forgotten.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Philippine economy collapsed by 9.6%. That’s the worst economic crisis of the Philippines since the Martial Law era, and even sadder, it was the worst crisis in ASEAN during the pandemic. On top of this, unemployment rose to 17.6% in April 2020, self-rated hunger soared to 31% in September 2020, and poverty inched up to 18.1% in 2021 (reversing previous years’ gains).

The fact that other countries like Vietnam managed to continue to grow at the height of the pandemic tells me that there was nothing at all inevitable about the crisis that we suffered under Duterte.

Rather than quickly respond to the pandemic in early 2020, Duterte chose to deny at the outset the existence of the virus. This cost us precious time we could have used to set up and expand quarantine facilities, mass testing, and contact tracing capabilities. But Duterte’s pandemic response centered on draconian lockdowns, which led to severe mobility restrictions, the closure of thousands of businesses, and the lost livelihoods of thousands more people in the workforce.

On top of the imposed hardships, the government refused to give sufficient ayuda or financial aid to our people. Carlos Dominguez III, the finance chief then, insisted that we ought to save fiscal ammunition for future waves of infection. But the needless fiscal prudence of Dominguez and the other economic managers led to the nonexistence of mass testing and contact tracing even one year after the pandemic started. It also prolonged the suffering of Filipino households. 

As a substitute to giving future waves of ayuda, socioeconomic planning chief Karl Chua insisted that we should reopen the economy as quickly as possible — but even if it wasn’t exactly safe to do that. Meanwhile, Congress — which was supposed to be a supermajority influenced by Duterte himself — failed to allot enough money for vaccines at the beginning, and ended up relegating vaccine funds in unprogrammed funds in 2021. The Duterte government also failed to quell vaccine hesitancy, leading to the very slow rollout of the vaccines.

All this led to a protracted economic crisis. Duterte put in place some form of quarantine restriction more than two years since the start of the pandemic. Inevitably, such a long lockdown or quarantine period left permanent scars on our economy: the graph below shows that the economic trajectory of our output or GDP (gross domestic product) has been pulled lower. This means that, in the coming years, if the government fails to boost growth, we will have to settle for much lower incomes than if the pandemic recession in 2020 wasn’t so deep.

To me, Duterte should also answer for his gross mishandling of COVID-19, both on the health and economic fronts — insofar as millions of lives were arguably damaged by the way he led (or in fact misled) the country.

But since there’s no legal mechanism to do so, we will have to settle for two things for now: Duterte’s trial at the ICC and a much wiser electorate in the 2028 elections and beyond. – Rappler.com

JC Punongbayan, PhD is an assistant professor at the UP School of Economics and the author of False Nostalgia: The Marcos “Golden Age” Myths and How to Debunk Them. In 2024, he received The Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) Award for economics. Follow him on Instagram (@jcpunongbayan) and Usapang Econ Podcast.