Philippine Development: A Research Journey Through the Philippine Journal of Development

• Main Author: Aldaba, Fernando T
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2002
• Subjects: Development Studies; Economics
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/economics-faculty-pubs/72; https://archium.ateneo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1071&context=economics-faculty-pubs
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

After 27 years of existence, the Philippine Journal of Development (PJD) is considered one of the longest running journals in the country. First published in 1974, the PJD started as a semestral publication of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) and was called the NEDA Journal of Development. The Journal aimed to serve as a vehicle to disseminate the important factors affecting the development process as well as a forum where development issues could be discussed from the larger perspectives of the social sciences. With the founding of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), the management of the Journal was transferred to it in 1981. The PJD has tried to capture the key issues of every decade from the dictatorship of the 70s; the peaceful revolution and difficulties of a fledgling democracy in the 80s; the more politically stable 90s, which paved the way for more substantial economic reforms; to the globalization and information technology age of the twenty-first century, which was ushered in by another People Power revolution. The economic policy shifts and the associated adjustment costs that characterized every decade have made the Philippine development arena an exciting challenge to research scholars and policymakers within and outside the country. The country’s boom-and-bust cycles, unsustainable economic growth, economic reforms like liberalization, privatization and deregulation as well as our participation in multilateral and regional trading arrangements have catalyzed numerous studies and analyses. The PJD has adequately served as a venue for these studies alongside topics ranging from macroeconomic stabilization and international competitiveness to poverty reduction, community-based forest management and rural credit markets. This paper embarks on a research journey as it reviews the various PJD articles that have been published through the years. Its main objective is to examine the Journal in terms of how it has contributed to the understanding of key developmental issues amid the changing international economic and political landscape, and how it has responded to the key policy issues and concerns that have emerged over time. What role has the PJD played in the country’s academic and policy research process? And did it attain its original goals? The paper will seek to answer these and other questions. It is divided into five sections. After an introduction in the first section, the second section gives an overall view of the economic and political events during the period 1972-2001 and the main objectives and thrusts of the PJD. This provides the overall context against which the PDJ is assessed. The third section presents the significant contributions of the PDJ in terms of three major areas: development issues and concerns, mathematical models and statistical techniques, and forward-looking articles. The fourth section looks at gaps and the research areas that could have been served by the PDJ while the fifth section summarizes the major findings and conclusions of the paper.