Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III has assured the country’s medium, small and micro enterprises (MSMEs) that the government is ready to provide funding support to gird them up for competition in the imminent common market for Southeast Asian economies, with two state-run banks having already extended or made available over P81 billion so far this year to help entrepreneurs in the countryside expand their businesses.

Dominguez said the Land Bank of the Philippines, which has offices across the country’s 81 provinces, has so far provided outstanding loans to MSMEs totaling P71 billion from January to September this year.

Another government-run financial institution, the Development Bank of the Philippines, has extended a total of P11.6 billion to MSMEs in the first 10 months of 2017 and has unveiled plans to increase the number of its account officers serving this sector by 25 percent to beef up its operations in 22 strategically located lending centers starting January 2018, Dominguez said.

“This is an exciting time to be an entrepreneur. The reforms are shifting government to the role and enabler rather than hindrance to business. The economy is rapidly expanding. Regionalization is progressing at a breathtaking pace,” said Dominguez at the Deliscents Business Forum held recently at the Seda Hotel Vertis North in Quezon City.

Besides making funds available for MSMEs, Dominguez said the government is also instituting reforms to improve further the ease of doing business, such as setting up the online trading platform TradeNet to fully automate licensing, permit-issuing, clearance and certification systems; and the Inter-Agency Business Process Interoperability program that aims to simplify and harmonize import and export documentation.

The Department of Finance (DOF), on his watch, has also formed an anti-red tape task force to cut redundant requirements and processes in the bureaucracy, Dominguez added.

He said the growth of the MSME sector, which employ nine out of 10 Filipinos, is the key to achieving inclusive growth not only in the Philippines but also in ASEAN’s nine other member-countries.

“I encourage entrepreneurs to look closely at the processes of regionalization. In the next few years, we expect to have a common market for the Southeast Asian economies. That will translate dramatically into an expanded market for all small- and medium- micro-enterprises in the region. Prepare, however, to compete for a larger share of that market,” Dominguez said.

He said MSMEs will be able to reap the benefits from regionalization and the country’s rapid economic growth “only if they remain alert to opportunities and passionately committed to innovation.”

“I trust all of you here have the alertness and the passion to thrive in the new business environment that is emerging,” Dominguez told entrepreneurs gathered at the event.

“We are coming up with nothing less than a new economy so different from the one our forebears might have gotten used to. Speed and creativity, energy and engagement are of vital importance for businesses today,” he added.

The finance chief said that to make growth more inclusive, the Philippines should shift from consumption- to investment-led growth, which can only be accomplished by embarking on a massive infrastructure modernization program and implementing a comprehensive overhaul of the country’s outdated tax system.

“Investments-led growth will create quality jobs for our people. It will catalyze backward and forward linkages in our economy, benefitting the MSMEs. It will improve our economy’s capacity for creating wealth. It will help build a highly skilled and competitive workforce,” Dominguez noted.

With third-quarter GDP growth at a better-than-expected 6.9 percent, Dominguez said the government expects the economy to again outperform expectations in the fourth quarter, and bring the pace of growth close to 7 percent.

“At that pace of expansion, we should be able to bring down poverty incidence dramatically by 2022 as desired by President Rodrigo Duterte,” he said.

He said even more encouraging is that investments as a percentage of GDP grew to 28.1 percent in the third quarter, bringing it very close to the Asian average of 30 percent.

Complementing the Duterte administration’s infrastructure buildup is a tax reform program that aims to make the current system simpler, fairer and more broadly based, Dominguez said.

Dominguez said he expects the first phase of the tax reform program now being deliberated in the Congress to be approved before the Christmas break and set for implementation by the start of the new year.

While waiting for the Congress to approve tax reform, the DOF has already been instituting administrative improvements in the Bureaus of Internal Revenue (BIR) and of Customs (BOC), which has led to improved revenue collections in the past months, Dominguez said.

“All these initiatives should increase the responsiveness of public agencies to the requirements of the private sector like yourselves. It will enable our enterprises to seize new opportunities opened both by faster economic expansion as well as regionalization of our economy,” he said.