The Duterte administration will replicate the successful Sulong Pilipinas consultative conference held in Davao City last June to further broaden multisectoral support for its 10-point socioeconomic agenda designed to sustain the economy’s high growth and deliver its tangible benefits to all Filipinos.
Department of Finance (DOF) spokesperson Paola Alvarez said in a prominent business forum that the “Sulong: Hakbang Tungo sa Kaunlaran” workshop, which was held in Davao City on June 20-21 with over 300 leaders of the business community, will also be conducted with various sectors by the different Cabinet secretaries to generate inputs and establish cohesive partnerships with concerned stakeholders in fleshing out President Duterte’s agenda of inclusive growth.
“We will be continuing the Sulong Pilipinas. So for different sectors, we will have different consultations involving the different Cabinet secretaries,” Alvarez said in an open forum atthe Financial Times-First Metro Philippines Investment Summit at the Fairmont Hotel in Makati City.
First Metro summit participants lauded the new administration’s 10-point socio-economic agenda and the Sulong Pilipinas workshop spearheaded by then incoming Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III in Davao City a week before President Duterte was sworn into office.
The then-incoming Cabinet members presented Mr. Duterte’s 10-point socioeconomic agenda and gathered inputs from the business sector on how the government could set new standards and implement reforms that would translate into tangible benefits, especially for poor and underprivileged Filipinos.
“I really think that’s a good start,” Makati Business Club (MBC) chairman Ramon del Rosario said of “Sulong Pilipinas” during the open forum at the Fairmont Hotel investment summit.
“The starting point, the consultation with the private sector even before the government sets in. It was a marvelous idea, and I hope that they will continue that because that is a source of a lot of ideas that can be incorporated into the government’s plan. And I think what they did was precisely that, that when the 10-point agenda came out it reflected to a large extent some of the things that the private sector has been talking about for some time,” said Del Rosario,
Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) director-general Lilia De Lima said at the same investment summit that, “Looking at the 10-point agenda of the new government, President Duterte puts the ease of doing business at number three, which is really, really, very important especially for the investors. It should be competitive enough for the country’s ease of doing business…”
“Most of the 10-point agenda are already there, but I think he (President Duterte) wants to put more emphasis on some of these things, especially the ease of doing business,” she added.
In line with the Duterte administration’s 10-point socio-economic agenda, Dominguez earlier said that the Duterte presidency would continue with the sound macroeconomic policies that have allowed the economy to grow under the previous administration, but would overhaul the policies and systems that have barred an overwhelming majority of Filipinos from partaking of such benefits.
Alvarez said at the FMIC forum that on generating investments, Dominguez has already taken concrete steps to ease doing business at the Department of Finance (DOF) with the appointment of Undersecretary Gil Beltran as the DOF’s anti-red tape czar.
“His [Beltran’s] job would be to simplify the processes, wherein the requirements in a certain department that would be needed should no longer be duplicated,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez said the government is also pursuing its plan to shift to a federal system of government to realize its goal of dispersing growth in the countryside.
“So instead of developments being centered in Metro Manila, we want to declog Metro Manila and develop each of the regions,” Alvarez noted.
On generating employment, Alvarez said the government will tap the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) to match jobs to the actual needs of the business sector.
“During the consultations with the business sector, they suggested that TESDA, in cooperation with the Department of Education, do a study….so we would tailor the TESDA skills training to complement the need of the business sector. We would train people based on what the business sector needs for their businesses,” she said.
Alvarez said that on the part of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), one of its priorities is to reduce rural poverty by strengthening the agriculture sector and encouraging farmers to form cooperatives to raise productivity.
These agricultural cooperatives, she said, would be encouraged to establish partnerships with businesses that would help them in marketing their products and tapping modern farming technologies.
During the first Sulong Pilipinas workshop in Davao City, Dominguez had challenged the business community to build with Government wide-reaching “coalitions for change” as the linchpin of an out-of-the-box, public-private partnership that would enable the country’s growth streak to continue and finally benefit the Filipino majority.
He had also called on the business sector to help the Duterte Administration draw up new and correct metrics or standards to later on measure whether Government has been meeting its socio-economic targets and, more importantly, whether such have been beneficial to poor and low-income families.
“I challenge the business community to build coalitions for change in every sphere of our social life,” Dominguez told over 300 Sulong delegates from the business sector.
Dominguez said the government needs “new metrics to understand how economic expansion could be made more meaningful for the majority of Filipinos.”
Following is President Duterte’s 10-point socio-economic agenda for inclusive growth:
1. Continue and maintain current macroeconomic policies, including fiscal, monetary, and trade policies;
2. Institute progressive tax reform and more effective tax collection, indexing taxes to inflation. A tax reform package will be submitted to Congress by September 2016;
3. Increase competitiveness and the ease of doing business. This effort will draw upon successful models used to attract business to local cities (e.g., Davao), and pursue the relaxation of the Constitutional restrictions on foreign ownership, except as regards land ownership, in order to attract foreign direct investment;
4. Accelerate annual infrastructure spending to account for 5% of GDP, with Public-Private Partnerships playing a key role;
5. Promote rural and value chain development toward increasing agricultural and rural enterprise productivity and rural tourism;
6. Ensure security of land tenure to encourage investments, and address bottlenecks in land management and titling agencies;
7. Invest in human capital development, including health and education systems, and match skills and training to meet the demand of businesses and the private sector;
8. Promote science, technology, and the creative arts to enhance innovation and creative capacity towards self-sustaining, inclusive development;
9. Improve social protection programs, including the government’s Conditional Cash Transfer program, to protect the poor against instability and economic shocks; and
10. Strengthen implementation of the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Law to enable especially poor couples to make informed choices on financial and family planning.
