AT the age of 25, the country’s chief economic planner was not the typical carefree young adult like many of his contemporaries. He knew what he wanted and knew how to get it.
In 1982 Arsenio M. Balisacan was employed as a research intern at the East West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. He also received funding from the United States-based institution to acquire his PhD in Economics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UH), where the East West Center was located.
At the time, Balisacan also uprooted his young family from Manila to Hawaii. His wife and 2-year-old son joined him eight months after he arrived in Honolulu.
Because he and his family could not live on campus where Balisacan was currently housed by the East West Center, he had to rent a small apartment near the UH.
Apart from pursuing his studies and doing research at the East West Center, Balisacan also took on teaching assistant jobs at the university to get additional funds to sustain him and his family in what is considered a “vacation” destination in the US.
Balisacan also recounted that his wife also had to get a job to add to the family’s income. Raising a small family is not easy when you have a toddler in a foreign land. And so, just like all working parents, Balisacan and his wife had to take turns in taking care of their son.
He also recounted how on Sundays he and his wife would venture out collecting coupons from all the newspapers they could find. He was couponing way before it was even considered “cool.”
“One thing we were good at then was gather all the newspapers on a Sunday to get all the coupons. Yes, we were couponing. That’s the only way you can save money. When we were starting, we just had enough because we had a family to support,” Balisacan said.
“We had no added source of income at the time and I only had my stipend. In fact, the money that I used to bring my family [to Hawaii], I borrowed that from a good friend,” he added.
These were small sacrifices compared to where he came from. Balisacan was not the typical government official who was schooled in private institutions and pursued further studies abroad using their parents’ money.
From his primary-school days all the way to his postgraduate studies, Balisacan had to rely on scholarships and grants as his family was poor.
Balisacan’s father was initially a farm tenant tilling fields at the foothills of the Sierra Madre mountains. When their relative convinced his father to take on a janitorial job in Laoag City, they had to leave their farm life behind.
In the city, Balisacan, his five other siblings and their parents stayed in a home where they were later evicted. Balisacan said he was in high school when their family was forced out of the property and had to go back to their tiny village at the easternmost part of Ilocos Norte.
“It was tough. It was only lately that I realized that we were an informal settler. We were squatting in somebody’s land. We didn’t realize that until much later. [When] I was already in high school, we were evicted from that place, and we had to return to that old town of ours,” Balisacan recalled.
When things got worse, Balisacan’s eldest brother graduated from Divine Word College. Armed with an Accounting degree, Balisacan’s eldest brother was offered a job in Cebu City by Atlas Mining.
The job allowed his brother to bring their family to Cebu to live. Balisacan, who was an Agriculture scholar at the Mariano Marcos State University (MMSU), had to stay behind in Batac, Ilocos Norte.
At the MMSU, Balisacan did not only excel in academics, as he was also a student leader. Despite being an Ilocano and studying at the MMSU, Balisacan had his fair share of the “fear” of the military.
As a student leader during martial law, Balisacan was leading some demonstrations and protests. At one point, the military “invited” him, but he was forewarned and was able to escape the dreaded invitation.
“It turned out that it wasn’t too serious, they just wanted to ‘invite’ me; ask me a few
questions, I guess. But you know what that means when they say they would ‘invite’ you,” Balisacan said.
When he completed his degree from the MMSU, Balisacan accepted a job offer in a local organization that promised to help him look for a scholarship to finance his master’s degree.
A year later, his employer fulfilled the promise and found a scholarship that financed Balisacan’s Master’s in Agricuture Economics at the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB).
Incidentally, the scholarship came from Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (Searca), a research institution that Balisacan would lead in the 2000s.
Graduate studies, Balisacan said, was really part of his dream from a very young age, because his ultimate dream was to lead a regional or international organization. He knew that graduate studies and publications would be required to boost his chances to achieve this.
This was the same dream he was fulfilling when he was at the UH at Manoa when he was 25 years old. At that time, his goal was to complete his doctorate degree by the age of 30. But, luck was on his side, and he was able to complete his degree by by the time he was 28 years old.
Balisacan said one of the reasons he was able to complete his studies faster was because from Day One, he knew what his research interests were. When he got to Hawaii, he already told his program director his interests, and the professor helped him chart the courses that would help him in his studies.
He said he chose courses that would help him support a particular dissertation topic. In that way, every term paper required in courses essentially became chapters for his dissertation. This is the reason by the time he reached his dissertation, 50 percent of his work was already complete.
Balisacan said his dissertation was about the politics of agriculture. He created a conceptual model of how developed and developing countries shifted their policy of taxing agriculture and subsidized consumers to a protectionist policy of subsidizing agriculture and taxing consumers over time.
He was able to support the study because of his Agriculture degree from the MMSU and master’s degree at the UPLB. In the end, Balisacan earned a PhD in Economics, and his area of focus became development economics.
It was no surprise that after completing his doctorate degree from the University of Hawaii, he was employed by the World Bank to work on a three-year multicountry research program at the global lenders’ headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“But, of course, the pressure, the inclination to come back was also high, especially because in 1986, when there was a change in government, there was all the swelling for transformation of the economy. I was a new PhD graduate, and I thought I could do something. The nationalist in me was starting to get into the picture,” Balisacan said.
Back in the Philippines, Balisacan continued his development work. He continued to publish his studies in academic journals, and some of these became books. Despite his achievements, Balisacan said none of his two children became economists.
Balisacan said he could not forget what his son told him when he tried to convince his child to take up economics. “I kept asking, why don’t you take up economics? I cannot forget what he told me. ‘Dad, I see you working very hard, every weekend you are always working but my friends have richer dads [and have more time to enjoy]’. So I guess my son was asking ‘What is this economics?’”
In the end, his son obtained a computer science degree from the Ateneo de Manila University and is now a game developer. His daughter, meanwhile, was also headstrong. Balisacan said after graduating from Miriam College High School, her daughter, who was born in the United States, told him she wanted to go to the US to pursue a degree in Business Administration.
At first, Balisacan was opposed to the idea, because studying in the US was very expensive. But his daughter did her homework and researched how she can obtain a student loan and housing while studying in the US. His daughter completed her studies and has recently moved back to the Philippines with her husband and child.
“At least, she believed me when I told her the economy was doing better, so she moved back. If I failed to convince her that there’s a good future for [her family] here, she might not have come back but she did,” Balisacan said.
After many decades in the development community, Balisacan still refuses to give up on his dream of leading a regional or international organization. He was only able to fulfill this dream when he was at Searca, which he felt he was successful in helping to become a regional research hub.
But he admits that being appointed as the country’s economic planning secretary under the current administration was a “unique and singular” opportunity. He said it was an opportunity to serve the President and the Filipino people.
As an academic, a government official and a family man, Balisacan said he does not care about the criticisms or any resistance about his work or decisions in life. This is because cynicism usually greets new studies, policies and other changes. But if the work or decision is true and is based on real evidence, he knows that history will vindicate him in the end.
Case in point, Balisacan said, was former President Fidel Ramos. The former President was criticized heavily for his decision to liberalize the telecommunications sector in the 1990s. Naysayers were criticizing the former President that he was destroying a local industry because he was allowing new players to come in.
But, Balisacan said, if it weren’t for that decision, the economy would not have had a business-process outsourcing (BPO) sector. The BPO sector is one of the, if not the biggest, contributors to the country’s economic success in the past decade.
Asked how he would want to be remembered, Balisacan said it is difficult to go on in life thinking about the kind of legacy he would leave behind. He said that what is important is to do his best under any circumstance.
“I have done, delivered what I could. Let time be my judge,” he said.