Speech of Undersecretary Gil S. Beltran

at the APEC Workshop on Fiscal Management through Transparency and Reforms

9 June 2015, 9:00AM

Dear APEC Colleagues, Partners in Government, Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you all for joining us today and welcome to Bagac, Bataan.

For the past five years, the Philippines has enjoyed growth rates of above 5 per cent, one of the highest in Southeast Asia. We attribute this economic gain from our current drive towards good governance, of which its centerpieces include fiscal transparency and sound management of fiscal resources, including tax reform.

As host of the APEC Finance Ministers’ Process (FMP) for this year, the Department of Finance-Philippines seeks to sustain the Philippines’ growth story and making this growth more inclusive. At the same time, it also aims to make a contribution to the ever-continuing goal of the APEC for “sustained economic growth in the region”. Given this, we have included in our Cebu Action Plan, the central agenda and our proposed roadmap for the APEC FMP, the initiatives on fiscal transparency and policy reform towards sustained and inclusive economic growth.

Our two-day Workshop here in Bagac intends to push forward the said initiatives. In this Workshop we feature, with the cooperation of the Department of Budget and Management-Philippines, Open Data Initiatives as a means for fiscal transparency. With fiscal transparency we foster good governance because wide availability of government data increases public scrutiny and participation, ensuring that government resources are conserved and properly used. This Workshop will also discuss various reforms in taxation, the aims of which is to prevent tax leakages, inefficient use of tax revenues and maximizing the value of tax revenues by using it for key development priorities. The topics on taxation reforms in this Workshop include, Sin Taxes for Social Health Financing, Fiscal Incentives Rationalization, Subsidy Targeting, Exchange of Information (EoI) and Automatic EoI and Base Erosion Profit Shifting (BEPS).

In bringing together policymakers, key government officials and stakeholders from the APEC economies, as well as global experts, we anticipate that the discussions in this Workshop can produce strategies to further enhance the work in fiscal transparency and policy reform. We also envision that this Workshop will serve as a venue for APEC economies to find areas of collaboration in fiscal transparency and policy reform, true to the role of APEC as a forum for economic and technical cooperation among its member-economies.

Thank you once again, for joining us in our Workshop and we look forward to your active participation.

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