Investors' concerns Merit Review
The Issue: Concerns raised by prospective investors who recently visited the CNMI rings familiar.
Our View: These concerns must be resolved forthwith lest NMI will continue losing investors.
Over the last several years, the NMI suffered heavily from the combined negative influences of external and internal influences.
We’ve vacillated between protecting our economic freedom versus that of our detractors’ agenda to annihilate our economic achievements over the last 20 years.
Troubling though that we neglect the basic fact that investments in these isles have hailed primarily from Japan and East Asia. As though ignorant of vicious assaults from without since 1997, we fueled our own demise by approving protectionist policies that flipped into the sea even fish in boat, so to speak.
It seems policymakers have no inkling of the images policies promote for or against investments. Our usual dish of political arrogance to serious economic setbacks did nothing but fuel the loss of revenue generation in recent years. There are serious indicators that should have caught the eyes of policymakers. But we ignored them with the usual dish of political arrogance as though there’s a pot of gold at the end of a virtual rainbow.
Perhaps familiarity or living with the same sets of longstanding problems no longer afford us the opportunity to see, with some semblance of clarity, what had gone wrong. Instead of proactively moving forward to resolving them, we played ostrich in hopes that answers would pop up across the horizon some fine day. Those answers never sailed nor drifted in from the Philippine Seas. It must come from within with resolute determination to resolve them forthwith.
If in doubt it, read carefully what recent visiting investors and investment analysts have said about the recurring problems of the lack of basic infrastructure, negative policies on investments, lack of manpower for their requirements, not to mention the lack of an organized approach to education designed to meet a fully defined socio-economic future of these isles.
Take stock and do something about it today or simply coast along like some drifted wood out in the open waters. Si Yuus Maase`!
