Plausability check: Philliphines as manufacturing powerhouse?

I’m trying to make sense why you are comparing the Philippines with South Korea and I concluded you were not talking about the 1980s as the OP stipulated.
Because multiple people were comparing the Philippines to South Korea? E.g.,

South Korea next that gets you to the 1980s for Goldstar and Hyundai selling stuff in the USA
Even a corrupt dictator isn't the real problem, that didn't stop South Korea or Taiwan

For that matter, you brought up South Korea in your initial post:

South Korea[n per-capita GDP] was only twice as high as the Philippines while productivity was far higher.

Why would you do this if you weren't trying to compare South Korean and Filipino industrialization? If population wasn't an impediment to South Korea becoming a major industrial power, why is it suddenly a problem for the Philippines? This entirely stems from the fact that you're trying to argue that the population of the Philippines was somehow too small to allow it to become a major industrial power (which is all the OP actually asks for, the comment about China is only a proposed scenario) while at the same time ignoring the fact that there are multiple even smaller nations in the same region that are major industrial powers. Obviously the population is not actually an issue that will necessarily make them a "niche player" in any meaningful sense.

But as I pointed out their wages were not all that competitive. That of course isn’t the only reason. A big part of low cost manufacturing is clothing exports. The global market for cheap clothing was only so big and industrialists in South Korea moved faster than their Filipino competitors. Case in point, Philippines cotton production did not surpass South Korea 1961 levels until 1991 and then it crashed.
So bring this up. These are the real problems with industrializing the Philippines, not the number of people there.

As for English speaking being an advantage for manufacturing I don’t see evidence to support that. If that were true the Indian subcontinent would have an unbeatable advantage. English speaking Filipinos with a little education make much better income abroad and remittences are vital. One area the Philippines did well was call center work. But here they have to compete with cheaper Indian labor. But that’s OT since it’s not manufacturing.
India's problem was the extreme regulation and difficulty of doing business there in the 1980s. If that hadn't been a problem, then they would indeed have had major advantages over China. As it was, China was rolling out the red carpet, which made up for the difficulty of doing business in Mandarin. It's also worth pointing out that India is not really that English-speaking. Only about 10% of India's population can speak English, according to an article I'm reading right now in Communications of the ACM on Indic-language computing, and only about 5% "is comfortable" reading or writing English. Meanwhile about 40 million Filipinos, or 40% of the population, are L2 English speakers (according to Wikipedia). That's a significant difference.
 
Isn't one of the problems that NAFTA talks had started during the 80s, which made companies consider Mexico over Philippines for outsourcing?
 
How possible is that? Say, US does not get along with mainland China in late 1970s all through 1980s, so US companies go to Philliphines en masse when out-sourcing started?

PoD 1970s not possible. Philippines had higher wages than South Korea, China in 1960s. Marcos period also saw the restart of the Communist rebellion in 1969, Moro rebellion in 1973. While Philippines debt to gdp ratio increased from 10% to 30% from 1965 to 1970, increase further to 90% by 1980, yearly budget deficits, inflation/poverty rates hitting 50%. By 1970s, South korea, Taiwan, Singapore had better environments. You prefer to invest there instead of the Philippines as a US corporation.

Marcos program went also the opposite of manufacturing being Rice and Roads, agriculture extraction economy. Although Marcos had the legal framework for manufacturing like The Progressive Car Manufacturing Program, these are mostly legal in nature rather putting the money/investments same level as rice production/infrastructure.

One advantage Philippines had at least from 1946 or 1950 PoD were regional offices, US corporations, regional assembly hubs were there due to the situation of all the Asian tigers minus Japan before Marcos. South Korea, Taiwan just came from a civil war, Singapore, Malaysia just became independent/came from Malayan Emergency.

Here is the manufacturing productivity per capita of the Philippines 1956-74:

philippine output per worker 1956-74.png


You can reverse the manufacturing fortunes from a POD of 1956 or earlier.
 
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