Senate President Franklin M. Drilon expressed concern on Tuesday about the country’s ability to meet its target economic growth this year, which, he said, is being dragged down by what continues to be an “alarming” trend of government underspending.
The Senate leader’s statement came after the Philippine Statistics Authority and the National Economic and Development Authority on Thursday reported the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) for the second quarter of 2015 at 5.6 percent, which is way below the 6.4 percent it registered in the same
period last year.
Drilon asked the country’s economic managers if the target GDP of 7 percent to 8 percent is still within reach, “when our present economic performance indicates otherwise?”
While he wishes to be as optimistic as the country’s economic managers, Drilon said that it is becoming more apparent now that the full-year target of 7-percent to 8-percent GDP is a “pipe dream.”
“The higher GDP target is ideal, but at the rate things are going it would be unattainable. It would mean the economy has to grow by at least 8.7 percent in the remaining quarters in order to achieve the minimum growth rate target of 7 percent, which is impossible to achieve,” Drilon said.
He noted that even Economic Planning Secretary and Neda Director General Arsenio M. Balisacan had earlier said that “the higher end of the 2015 goal would be difficult to achieve.”
“I am, therefore, asking our Cabinet members who lead the government’s economic cluster to conduct a serious reassessment of our current standing, including a realistic description of what the country could and could not achieve for this year. Only then can we move forward and come up with the necessary solution,” Drilon said.
He pointed to government underspending as one of the key areas which require “immediate action,” citing that government spending represents nearly 20 percent of the Philippines’s annual GDP.
“The 3.9-percent increase in government consumption in this quarter is a welcome development, but it is obvious much more needs to be done in terms of fixing issues on spending, such as bureaucratic bottlenecks, especially in the public infrastructure sector,” Drilon said.
(PNA, Recto Mercene)