Good rules in India, bad ones in the Philippines

ìIn Wake of Fire, Indian State Bans Thatched Roofs on Schools,î by David Rohde, New York Times, 19 July, p. A7.

ìCurbing Foreign Investment: Philippine Constitution Derails Development of Certain Sectors,î by James Hookway, Wall Street Journal, 19 July, p. A9.

India suffers a Station Nightclub-like fire in a private school and the country is aghast. With the countryís booming economy, more and more families are dishing out the rupees to put their kids in expensive private schools, which, even though they are often overcrowded, ìoffer a prized English education that parents believe can give their children an advantage.î Right on, say I, as ESL (English as a Second Language) is one of globalizationís great connecting tissues.

So the fire happens and the affected Indian state does exactly what little Rhode Island did after the Station Nightclub fire, it starts pushing all sorts of new fire code regulations and immediately closes all schools that have the offending thatched roofs until theyíre replaced by something safer.

That is a rule-set reset of the good sort.

Hereís the bad one: after dictator Ferdinand Marcos was ousted in 1987, his opponents wrote a badly nationalistic constitution that forbade foreign direct investment in certain sectors. The result is not surprising: a serious lack of development in those sectors because foreign money cannot be tapped and the Philippines economy itself can only self-finance so much. Guess some would rather be a proud-but-poor Filipino.

So there has been no foreign-funded mining operations in the Philippines since 1968. That is why the Philippines are in the Gap, while ESL-crazed India moves into the Core: the former wants connectivity, but still too much on its own terms, while the latter accepts the notion that connectivity requires the synchronization of internal code with that of the outside world.