Still searching. A resident stands in front of a residential building that was collapsed by a massive earthquake in Mianzhu, in southwest China’s Sichuan province, on Wednesday, two days after the magnitude-7.9 quake. His wife was still buried under the debris, said Kyodo News, which distributed this photo. --AP

COLLECTIONS from the 12-percent reformed value-added tax, or R-VAT, in 2007 went slightly above target at P88.93 billion, the Department of Finance (DOF) said Thursday, amid intensifying debates on whether the government should consider suspending the tax on petroleum products to ease public pain from rising prices, even at the risk of derailing fiscal balance.

Domestic manufacturers, meanwhile, asked the DOF to correct the wrong practice of levying VAT on the system losses  of the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco).  It was absurd, said the Federation of Philippine Industries (FPI), to tax a loss; the remedy need not go through legislation, the group said.

A paper by Moody’s Investor Service, published out of its Hong Kong office Thursday, said the challenge comes from two of the country’s wireless-phone providers, Globe Telecommunications and Smart Communications. Their wireless-phone services come with the added feature of remittance via text messaging, or short messaging service, where costs are definitely much lower than those offered by the banks.

THE Philippines has improved in its ranking in the World Competitiveness Yearbook 2008 (WCY) released Thursday by an international business school based in Switzerland, the Institute for Management Development (IMD).

The WCY is considered the world’s most renowned and comprehensive annual report on the competitiveness of nations. It ranks and analyzes how a nation’s environment creates and sustains the competitiveness of industries.

COMPUTER manufacturer IBM announced Thursday it is taking on the rice crisis—with the help of Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (Irri) and the University of Washington—using IBM’s World Community Grid, a supercomputer network that contains one million registered devices, to form the largest humanitarian grid in the world.

THE National Capital Region (NCR) wage board has decided on a P20 wage increase for Metro Manila, but this was still subject to further “refinements” when President Arroyo announced it around noontime  Thursday.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—The Philippines and Pakistan are working on increasing trade relations with the drafting of a memorandum of understanding establishing a joint economic commission to lay down a mechanism to review bilateral economic relations.

Philippine Ambassador to Pakistan Jaime Yambao said the volume of trade between the two countries, $71 million in 2006, is “still small,” or only 0.08 percent of the country’s total trade.

THE Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) may have to increase its outstanding capital stock to 32.287 million common shares to reduce the ownership percentage of stockbrokers to the 20-percent limit as required under the Securities Regulation Code.

THE government should give more weight to the interest of the whole country, and not just a “small group of local carriers,” in deciding on the opening of the Clark and Subic airports to more foreign airlines, the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (Amcham) said on Thursday.

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ERNESTO BATUNGBACAL (left), country executive of the System and Technology Group of IBM, and Eugene Bay, regional sales manager of the IBM System p5 and eServer, Series IBM Asean/SA, discuss their new line of servers in a gathering with customers, ISVs and IBM business partners at a Makati City hotel. --NONIE REYES