AS the Philippines continues to grapple with questions around economic recovery and long-term growth, Penguin Random House Southeast Asia is proud to publish "Twin Plagues: How Duterte and Covid-19 Wrecked the Philippine Economy" by economist and public intellectual JC Punongbayan.

In this book, Punongbayan offers a timely and rigorously researched account of how governance failures, institutional decline and the Covid-19 pandemic combined to produce the country’s worst postwar recession and the deepest economic contraction in Southeast Asia.

"Twin Plagues" is more than a book about statistics, policy decisions and economic indicators. It is also a book about memory. As Punongbayan argues, societies emerging from difficult periods often feel an understandable urge to move on, to forget the discomfort and uncertainty that defined those years. The temptation is to treat the experience as a bad dream and leave it behind.

But forgetting comes at a cost. Through accessible storytelling, contemporary reporting and careful analysis, Twin Plagues revisits a period that shaped the lives of millions of Filipinos not merely to assign blame, but to understand how ordinary people experienced the consequences of political decisions. The book is ultimately a human account of what happens when institutions weaken, public trust erodes and crises expose vulnerabilities that had long been ignored.

Drawing on economic data, policy analysis and years of public discourse, Twin Plagues challenges the persistent narrative that the Duterte administration managed the economy successfully. Instead, Punongbayan demonstrates how many of the country’s economic difficulties predated the pandemic, rooted in governance choices that weakened the foundations needed to withstand future shocks. Covid-19, the book argues, did not create these problems — it revealed and amplified them.

Punongbayan is available for interviews, commentary, podcasts, panel discussions and media appearances. He can speak on a range of topics, including the Philippine economy, governance and public policy, authoritarian populism, economic resilience, inequality, Southeast Asian politics and the long-term economic impact of Covid-19.