AS vaccination in the Philippines gathers steam, the Department of Finance (DOF) is now more confident that the country will see better economic prospects in the second quarter of the year.
In a speech at the virtual general membership meeting of the Pampanga Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PamCham) on Thursday, Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III said the economy may already be on more solid footing due to the vaccinations.
Dominguez said if things go according to plan, the country can expect a significant containment of infections by the second half of 2021.
“In the second quarter of this year, we expect to begin growing our economy again. We see that the second wave of infections that started at the end of March has subsided dramatically. We hope that this will be the last surge,” Dominguez said.
The finance secretary said vaccinations done by the government may be able to inoculate 70 million Filipino adults, as well as 15 million teenagers once a Covid-19 vaccine is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for this age group.
Dominguez also said vaccine deliveries have started to pick up and is allowing the government to open the inoculation program to frontline workers in essential sectors of the economy.
“We are also in the process of negotiating for the booster shots next year. The Covid-19 pandemic should soon be contained,” said Dominguez.
Expand, go digital
With this, Dominguez encouraged Pampanga’s business community, as well as other micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to continue with their expansion plans.
He also urged businessmen to accelerate their digitization efforts in order to meet the demands of the new normal.
These efforts, expansion and digitalization, will also help the government create more jobs for millions who lost their employment due to the lockdowns.
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported that the country’s unemployment rate was at 7.1 percent which meant 3.44 million Filipinos did not have jobs.
“We will be relying on MSMEs to drive our economic recovery. MSMEs employ the majority of workers in the country. They will play a key role in bringing down our unemployment and poverty rates,” Dominguez said.
Several game-changing reforms have also been passed under the Duterte administration that have allowed MSMEs in the country to flourish, with Pampanga as among the biggest beneficiaries of these measures.
These reforms, among others, are the Ease of Doing Business (EODB) Act to make it easy and convenient for people to start a business and encourage existing enterprises to expand their operations; the digitalization of the filing and payment of taxes in the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR); and the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) Law that ensured a steady revenue flow for the government and boosted the disposable incomes of 99 percent of salaried workers through substantially reduced personal income tax (PIT) rates.