NEW YORK—With an eye to achieving the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development Goals, the Philippines championed its key initiative on financing for development at the general debate of the recent 2019 Economic and Social Council Financing for Development Forum Follow-up at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
Assistant Secretary Maria Edita Z. Tan of the Department of Finance-International Finance Group (DOF-IFG) pointed out that the country’s inclusive, high-growth story is backed by strong macroeconomic fundamentals and affirmed that the Philippines remains on track to join economies in the upper middle-income status in the medium term.
The Philippines, she added, has put in place an inclusive financial system, a broader tax system, an economy driven by investments to provide quality jobs, and a high-quality infrastructure plan that will both improve the quality of life for Filipinos and make its economy competitive.
“To support a more inclusive and sustainable growth, the Philippines has embarked on a massive infrastructure development through the ‘Build, Build, Build’ program. This will help make the economy fully competitive, create jobs, open more business opportunities, bring down logistics costs and realize better-distributed growth,” Tan said.
“The government, guided by the Philippine Development Plan 2018-2022, expands its infrastructure spending through an optimal mix of local funding, official development assistance [ODAs] from development partners and Public-Private Partnership [PPP],” she added.
Tan stressed that at the core of this strategy is the sustained fiscal discipline where debt is kept at manageable levels—currently at 41.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—to ensure financial strength to support the massive infrastructure program intended to provide a strong stimulus for domestic economic activity.
She also cited the Philippines’s Comprehensive Tax Reform Program, which aims to create a more equitable, simple and more effective tax system, promote investment, create jobs and reduce poverty. The CTRP will assure the country of sufficient revenues to fund the infrastructure modernization and expand social services, such as the Universal Health Care and free tuition in state universities and colleges.
The Philippines is also actively working to create a business environment conducive to the mobilization of private-sector resources, she reported. In 2018, a new law, Personal Property Security Act (PPSA), was introduced to pave the way for the use of alternative assets such as inventory and accounts receivables as collateral for credit.
Tan said the Ease of Doing Business Act of 2018 aims to reduce red tape significantly and make the government more responsive to the needs of entrepreneurs especially the micro, small and medium enterprises as it would be easier to implement peer-to-peer lending, equity crowdfunding, merchant and e-commerce finance, and invoice finance.
The Financing for Development Forum brings together
ministers, high-level officials from ministries of finance, foreign affairs and
development cooperation, executive directors of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, as well as senior officials from the UN system,
including the major institutional stakeholders, and other
international organizations.
Image credits: New York PM photo