“My biggest frustration as a presidential adviser is that 34 quarters of uninterrupted expansion in the past nine years did little to reduce poverty and the number of poor people,” said Salceda. “Given our average economic growth in the last four decades, it would take 37 years for the poor to get out of poverty.”

In one fell swoop, he tied together two threads the administration had worked hard to separate so that one could be extolled and the other downplayed. Essentially, if the Philippines has enjoyed the highest average growth rate of 4.4 per cent in Gross Domestic Product since the Marcos administration began in 1965, it has failed to translate this growth into an improvement in the lives of the majority of the population.

Salceda cited data, a couple of years old, from the National Statistical Coordination Board, which showed that the number of poor Filipinos (defined as those living on barely over 1,200 pesos-US$26.3 a month) numbered 27.6 million in 2006, compared to the 25.472 million under the same classification in 2001. Salceda also pointed out that hunger incidence nearly doubled from 11.4 per cent in 2000 to 20.3 per cent in 2009.

On the other hand, Salceda, who has impeccable credentials in the financial markets, pointed out that profits of the country’s top 1,000 corporations jumped by 21 per cent per year while the return on their equity or investments increased by 15 per cent per year in the time that the Arroyo administration has been in power.

Yet as former Socio-economic Planning Secretary Cielito Habito pointed out, around the same period (he said this circa 2007) domestic investments weren’t taking place, even as foreign direct investments began to slow down. Salceda fleshed out this point thus: “Their total earnings amounted to 3.1 trillion pesos ($67.8 billion) of which 2.1 trillion pesos ($45.9 billion) were pocketed as dividends or earnings of the stockholders and only 1 trillion pesos ($21.9 billion) were re-invested,” which suggests a lack of confidence in the very domestic market that has richly rewarded these companies.

Some economists have cited political, and not just economic, reasons for this. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and the recent Great Recession globally have focused businesses on paring down debt and being extremely conservative. But as Habito pointed out, if additional domestic investment was taking place, it was to replace equipment due to wear and tear but not to expand, unless by means of mergers in some sectors like banking. On the other hand, for some truly big players, there was expansion of a sort, but not by means of taking advantage of a free market. Rather, as Salceda pointedly observed, “The oligarchies were just too sturdy as the state was weak due to the ‘Hello, Garci’ (cheating anomaly of President Arroyo in the 2004 elections) case. The business sector really exploited it.”

Salceda’s was a pointed indictment of President Arroyo’s transactional leadership and confirms the chaotic diagram authored by now-disgraced former Socio-economic Planning Secretary Romulo Neri Jr. of certain big players who thrived due to their closeness to the administration.

All this lays out the clear task at hand for whoever ends up as the country’s next president: how to make the massive portion of the population that is poor reap more benefits from economic growth. The past decade has been, in many ways, a lost decade for the majority of the population even as it will be looked upon with nostalgia by those who maximized business benefits from their closeness to a discredited administration.