The Department of Finance (DOF) is currently recruiting highly-competent and committed individuals who are willing to support President Duterte’s economic team in crafting a bounce-back plan for the domestic economy and then supporting implementation as soon as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is over.
Finance Assistant Secretary Antonio Joselito Lambino II said the DOF’s Strategy, Economics and Results Group (SERG), which he heads, is building its team to support state economic managers in coming up with a recovery and stimulus plan for the Philippine economy.
“There is so much we all need to do to help each other get back on our feet. A crucial part of our national recovery effort is crafting and implementing a bounce-back plan for our economy,” Lambino said.
“SERG is building up its team that will support our economic managers in making this happen,” he added.
Lambino said the COVID-19 pandemic has affected various aspects of Filipinos’ lives—our families and communities, places of work and industries, and the Philippine economy overall.
He said that what the DOF needs for the team are purpose-driven, results-oriented, and dedicated workers who are passionate about the effective and efficient delivery of government programs and services to the Filipino people.
In close partnership with other government agencies and stakeholders, Lambino said the work of the would-be recruits includes helping provide relief to poor and low-income families via such programs as DSWD’s emergency subsidy program (ESP) and for employees of small businesses to keep their jobs and for their employers to create more jobs in the future.
The team also contributes to the plan of ushering and boosting inclusive growth, job creation, and poverty reduction; and laying a strong foundation for the nation’s renewed pursuit of inclusive development and shared prosperity under the post-pandemic “new normal” scenario, he said.
Lambino said all of these would require raising resources from better expenditure management, improved tax policy, better tax administration, effective debt management, and other innovative and equitable means to share the costs of recovery.
“To achieve these objectives, we need a combination of technical specialists and effective communicators: people who listen well and engage effectively with all kinds of stakeholders; build coalitions for change; recast complex jargon into popular language; while also bringing ideas of stakeholders to the attention of policymakers,” Lambino said.
“The government needs highly competent, compassionate, and committed individuals who are strategic thinkers, who can communicate well, and work with teams to help our country rise above this present crisis,” he said. Interested individuals may find application guidelines on the DOF Facebook page.
Amid the spread of the disease, the economic team of the Duterte administration is working hard to raise additional funds by using an arsenal of fiscal and monetary tools and tapping concessional financing options from multilateral institutions to keep the economy afloat.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III earlier said this economic bounce-back plan is among the four pillars of the Duterte administration’s socioeconomic strategy against COVID-19.
These four pillars also include the emergency support for the poor and other vulnerable groups, continuously mobilizing resources needed to fight the pandemic, and fiscal and monetary actions to fund emergency initiatives and keep the economy afloat amid the global health crisis.
This new set of government priorities will require around P1.45 trillion-worth of fiscal, budgetary and monetary measures, of which a significant portion or around 1.7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), will go to emergency subsidies for poor and low-income households plus other vulnerable groups suffering the most from the pandemic’s economic hit.
Dominguez said the Duterte administration’s flagship projects under the “Build, Build, Build” program will continue and will not be downgraded, as this will primarily “fuel our bounce back plan.”
Dominguez said in a TV interview there would be enough funds to support the different sectors of the society if ever the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) goes beyond April 30, 2020.
But he clarified that this did not mean the government was planning now to extend again the ECQ in Luzon.
“We will make sure that there will be enough funds to support those decisions. We are watching this very carefully and we are moving very conservatively,” Dominguez said on TV.
The month-long ECQ was supposed to end on April 12 but the government decided to extend it until April 30 in an effort to stop the further spread of the highly contagious virus.
On top of providing economic relief to poor and low-income families, Dominguez said the needs of the middle class have also been initially addressed under Republic Act (RA) No. 11469 or the Bayanihan Law through the grant of grace periods or extensions for them to pay their amortizations and other forms of loans.
Moreover, he said, the government will provide some 3.4 million employees in small businesses a wage subsidy of P5,000 to 8,000 per eligible worker affected by the ECQ in Luzon and similar quarantine measures in other parts of the country that are currently being implemented to contain the spread of COVID-19.
This wage subsidy program will benefit 2.6 million workers whose employers are compliant with the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) and Social Security System (SSS) regulations and thus can be easily identified and automatically processed for coverage if they are eligible.
The program will also support another 800,000 workers whose employers are not fully compliant with the SSS or BIR as the government understands that the non-compliance may have been caused by inadvertent mistakes on the part of the employer.
These workers who belong to the low- to medium-middle class, are employed in some 1.6 million small businesses in the formal sector that are affected by the ECQ.
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