CEBU CITY—The government plans to accelerate its spending for infrastructure and other items in the budget to help pump-prime the economy and ward off the ill effects of uncertainties in the United States, one of the country’s main trading partners.

National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) Director-General Cayetano Paderanga Jr., who is also the socioeconomic planning secretary, said it is important to pump-prime the economy at this time because the impact of the downgrade of the US’s credit rating cannot be ascertained at this point. 

“We want to speed up the infra because of our needs. But at the same time, you want it to be in a systematic way because you want to make it count,” Paderanga explained to reporters on Thursday.

Paderanga said the government is undertaking wise spending of public resources through a “systematic review” of the national transportation and communication systems.

This is to ensure that the taxpayers’ money is not used for projects that are not needed or are just a complete waste of funds, he said. This is also a way for the government to ensure that the projects would generate enough jobs.

A review of the national transportation and communication systems would also help the government focus on the infrastructure support that investors need to set up shop in the country, Paderanga added. 

The infrastructure support could be in the form of improving ports that will serve as the gateway for both tourists and industry, as well as aid agro industrial processing. 

“We haven’t reached the industrial side yet. But that will become clearer when the processes have been cleaned up. That’s the only time you could look at the numbers. We really want to bring down the cost of doing business,” Paderanga said partly in Filipino. 

But Sen. Ralph Recto, a former Neda director general, said that while the House of Representatives and the Senate passed the 2011 budget on time, the main problem was that the economic team did not spend it on time. 

“Being thrifty is correct, but not too much. We hope we can do better [spending] in second half. It’s a catch-up decade for us,” Recto said.

Earlier, Budget Secretary Florencio Abad said spending in the first two quarters reached P698.9 billion, or 40.8 percent of the full-year disbursement program of P1.711 trillion. This is 7.7 percentage points lower than the average first semester performance from 2005 to 2010 of 48.5 percent.

The first semester spending was P139.7 billion or 16.7 percent lower than programmed; and lower by P90 billion or 11.4 percent year-on-year.