Mercantile Transformations: Understanding the State,Global Debt and Philippine Agriculture

This paper examines an important continuity in the political economy of the Philippines: the interplay between domestic merchant capitalists and the state over the role of the state in the Philippine economy. During the Marcos regime, this interplay increasingly took the form of competition between state mercantile interests and ‘private’ merchant interests. This competition is still being played out. To better understand the nature of the competition, consideration is focused on two essential contemporary facts: the Philippines has a major external debt crisis and the Philippines, still predominantly an agrarian country, suffers from stagnant productivity growth and enduring rural poverty. While the Philippine external debt problem can be attributed in significant part to various international hegemonic interests, the analysis concludes that the characteristics of the crisis primarily reflect changing state/class/economy configurations within the Philippines. These same configurations, in turn, significantly influence the implications of the external debt crisis on Philippine agriculture.