All Boats Rise The Tide Comes In Here Because It’s Going Out Somewhere Else

Lunch last week at a new French restaurant in Clark, a couple of hours north of Manila. Authentic, genuinely good - the sort of place you'd have booked ahead for in Singapore.

Which is where it was. The founders ran it there for years, until the city priced them out. So they moved it to the home town of one of the partners, and now they serve the same food at a third of the cost.

Singapore isn't just expensive, they said. It grinds people down. They'd spent years serving stressed-out customers and trying to motivate staff who were struggling just to get by. Here they have a happy team who turn up smiling, glad of the work, and it shows when they walk you through the menu and serve the food.

The worry you hear about the Philippines is that it lacks the ambition to keep pace, that the gaps are too wide and the will to close them isn't there. Those problems are real.

But the restaurant didn't come because Manila fixed anything. It came because Singapore got too expensive.

That's what the pessimists leave out. Growth doesn't only come from the inside - better roads, cleaner government. Some of it arrives from outside, when the alternatives become unbearable.

A business leader said to me once, in a meeting in Manila: 'it doesn't take a lot of people to start a revolution'. One restaurant, then its suppliers, then the friend who visits and doesn't go home. Then people hear about it, and more come and do the same.

Good government would help. It always does. But prosperity and growth has never waited for it. Sometimes the water rises in one place because it's draining away somewhere else.

PS. More from the corridor here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidthomas-asia/