NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) reported a year-on-year increase of 468,000 jobs generated in the construction sector based on a Labor Force Survey conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority in April, 2018. DOLE Secretary Silvestre H. Bello III...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo When I was in high school, I watched “The Bucketlist” with two of my closest friends — Karen Jumarang and Chynna Cuna. It was a film staring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman about two terminally ill men on a road trip with a list of things to do before they...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo It was a Wednesday afternoon and we were about to discuss a case study on Ronald MacLean Abaroa — the first democratically elected mayor of La Paz in four decades. This was at a time when Bolivia was considered the poorest nation in South America and was suffering...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo It was a Wednesday afternoon and our professor — Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jamil Mahuad asked us to sit as his cabinet members and navigate through the crisis of Ecuador in the year of 1998 – at the time when he was elected president. For eight hours, we learned...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo Few years back, as my travel to Mindanao became more frequent with the construction of the Mindanao Road Network Development, a 2,567-km road network in Northern Mindanao, Davao, SOCCSKSARGEN, and CARAGA Regions, I have developed a more nuanced view of Islam and...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo For years, Filipinos are reminded of the deteriorating state of Philippine infrastructure — from economic losses causing 3.5 billion a day due to traffic congestion to the increase in road usage every year. Estimates by the Japan International Cooperation Agency...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo Almost two years after President Rodrigo Duterte launched its Build Build Build program, Philippine government’s most ambitious infrastructure plan — computer-generated images which were once used to present a vision are turning into actual roads, bridges,...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo Increased government spending, propelled by the Duterte administration’s “Build, Build, Build” program, and strong household consumption drove the Philippine economy to grow by 6.8% in the first quarter of the Fiscal Year of 2018 — surpassing World Bank’s...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo The Plaridel Bypass Road project, a new arterial road traversing the municipalities of Balagtas, Guiguinto, Plaridel, Bustos, and San Rafael in the province of Bulacan has been opened. DPWH Secretary Mark A. Villar, Minister Keiichi Ishii of the government of...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo Sustainable Tourism Development has been the subject of both international and domestic discourse, and is particularly important when the life cycle of many tourist destinations, including Boracay, is at risk of irreversible collapse. In his study, “A New Approach...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo Following President Rodrigo Duterte’s mandate of increasing transparency and accountability in government, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) has put an end to ghost projects this 2018 as it migrates to a fully automated new monitoring system —...
NIGHT OWL Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo The “Build, Build, Build” program is the Duterte administration’s medium-term goal to increase infrastructure spending from 5.4 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2017, to 7.3 percent by the end of President Rodrigo Duterte’s term in...
