The country’s top economic officials, together with Dr. Hiroto Izumi, special adviser to the Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe, are set to hold a high-level meeting in Hakone, Japan, to discuss the progress of the national government’s infrastructure projects that are being implemented with funding support from Tokyo.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III and Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia will lead the Philippine delegation for the meeting set on Friday, December 6, 2019.
The meeting in Hakone of the Japan-Philippines Joint Committee on Infrastructure Development and Economic Cooperation will be the ninth such dialogue between the two countries.
The first meeting was convened in March 2017 at Kantei, the Prime Minister’s Office in Tokyo, Japan, and the most recent, or eighth, held at the Marriott Hotel in Clark, Pampanga.
According to Dominguez, the regular meetings between the Philippines and Japan is part of the “fast and sure” approach adopted by the two countries to ensure the smooth and swift implementation of the Japan-funded projects under President Duterte’s “Build, Build, Build” (BBB) infrastructure modernization program.
A clear demonstration of this “fast and sure” approach was the signing of 10 loan agreements between Manila and Tokyo since President Duterte assumed office in June 2016, Dominguez said.
Several of these agreements involving infrastructure projects, said Dominguez, were each processed and approved in a short span of three to four months.
The loan agreements include the Phase 2 for Maritime Safety Capability Improvement Project for the Philippine Coast Guard; Harnessing Agribusiness opportunities through Robust and Vibrant Entrepreneurship Supportive of peaceful Transformation; Cavite Industrial Area Flood Risk Management Project; Bulacan Arterial Road Bypass Project; New Bohol Airport Construction; Metro Rail Transit Line 3 Rehabilitation; Pasig-Marikina River Channel Improvement; North-South Commuter Railway Extension; Metro Manila Subway Project, which is the single biggest venture under the BBB program; and Road Network Development Project in Conflict-Affected Areas in Mindanao.
As of this writing, Japan remains to be the top provider of Official Development Assistance loans and grants totaling $8.26 billion [46-percent share of the country’s total ODA loan portfolio].
It is also the Philippines’s fourth- largest source of tourists, with over 631,000 Japanese having visited the country in 2018. Last year’s arrivals from Japan grew 8.15 percent over the same period in 2017.