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Philippines. When we decided to transfer our Internal Revenue Allotment shares from
national government to the local, we have a formula. Use the population… How many
are they? The land area, and equal sharing. That’s not the way to do it. We learned
that. The way you do it, because if you transfer it all that those who have will go
higher, those who have lower will also go higher, so, you still have the gap. So, what
we are suggesting, and I’m part of this movement in the Philippines, is we should
include poverty as an index. The poorer one should be given more, and the richer
ones, don’t give them. They’re rich enough. And that’s also part of our discussion on
decentralization. And apart from poverty, we can also use performance as an
indicator. When we talk about performance, sometimes, I say performance can have
some kind of substitution effect. People at the lower level would say, anyway,
the money is coming to us. We just wait. We will not work. So, it’s a substitution
effect. Point therefore, we should introduce, which I’m trying to do in the Philippines,
a poverty index, and also a performance index in the distribution of finances to the
local level.
Another point for decentralization is important of political will. Leadership is
important, discover leadership is important and changing and learning to let go. I’ve
said earlier, one major problem, one major obstacle to decentralization in not
institutions. It is our mindset. It is our paradigm. Many, many times, people at the
national government say, I am in charge, I will tell you what to do. And sometimes,
people at the local level say, we will not do anything, we will just wait for guidelines.
Changing the mindset is all about self-reliance, and also, I wouldn’t say self-
sufficiency. That’s what decentralization is all about. That’s why the importance of
capacity building.
I have ten more minutes, Mr. Chairman, right?
So, with decentralization, this morning we talked about the importance of It will
enhance transparency, accountability, the rule of law. I’ll now go to Philippine context.
But, as I said earlier, this discussion on decentralization, is not new. As the matter of
fact, other countries… I don’t know if my good friend, Agus, will correct me, but
others have actually wanted to separate. In Spain: as you know, Catalonia, Basque;
UK: Scotland, Northern Ireland; Czechoslovakia; in Canada: Quebec wanted to
separate; Indonesia: Aceh, Ambon, Timor; Thailand: I don’t know, Pattani. I don’t
know. Please forgive me. But, I’ve read about that some time back. I don’t know.
But my point is they wanted some kind of autonomy at one point. I might be wrong.
I’ve been to Pattani. But, I’m very careful speaking to all Thai audience.
The Philippines is even in the south.
My point is that we don’t look at them as movements to separate. We look at
them as movements as one more autonomy. And the way this can be addressed is
through the process of decentralize, decentralization, or decentralisasi.
The next slide just talks about the logical stuff which is devolution, and the next ª£¸²£ª±¡¡²¥¸h¡¢h¢µÈ
slide just talk about the experiences. Today, our Chairperson mentioned about
