Yes, that's true. In terms of legal policy, the government has very much
modifi ed the rules because of the excessive population migrating into the
Manila area . The govern-ment was also very worried about it, and also the
media. But in ov erall, I Iook at the sta-tistics, and find that was true
before. All was just l ike Japan, Tokyo and Osaka.
It is true that migration is continuing into that big metropolitan area from th
e rural area. But as of now, particularly in the recent decade of 1980-1990, on
e can simply judge from population increase rate in the Manila metropolitan are
a that it absorbed a tremendous population. But now, I say that it is coming do
wn. Now the population of even the met-ropolitan shadow cities is coming to sev
en million, comparable to the population of Metro-Manila. In a sense, some popu
lations are moving into the shadow areas from Metro-Manila.
As to other areas, this is also true for even the island of Mindanao. Now the M
indanao population is increasing, and it used to send migrants to other islands
, particularly to Ma-nila. So this is now the overall situation.
Anyway, in terms of population increase rate, it is actually coming down in the
Manila Metropolitan area. And it has started to increase measurably in other is
lands also. This is my view of the situation.
Chairman
Thank you. Next question?
(Hon. Oscar S. Rodriquez, MP, PHILIPPINES)
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I come from the Philippines as the sole delegate.
I th ank the good professor, Professor Kuroda for giving his optimistic statement
th at soon the Phil-ippines will be a developed one, with its rapid economic
devel opment today. I want to thank him fully for this serious study on our
urbanizat ion problem. I think the study is very accurate.
However, we want to emphasize a point about reclassification. According to his
lecture, the urbanization problem is brought about by the three different reaso
ns, migration, natu-ral increase, as well as the classification and reclassific
ation of areas. In the Philippines we reclassify areas from municipalities into
cities after attaining a certain level of eco-nomic growth, and after attaining
a certain income level as well as a certain population level, and then only we
will approve or agree to a transformation from an original mu-nicipality into a
city which is duly approved by Congress. But definitely not from the Barangay l
evel.
