FORMER Finance Secretary Margarito “Gary” B. Teves, who was acclaimed as Asia’s best finance minister during Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s (GMA) presidency, apparently could not take it anymore.
President Aquino’s repeated assertions that GMA’s term as president, which lasted from January 2001 to June 2010, was a “lost decade” for the Philippine economy, must have been too much to bear, so he had to break his silence to set the record straight.
Teves served as GMA’s finance chief from 2005 to 2010, during which he was cited as Asia’s best finance minister by The Banker, the highly regarded, London-based international-finance magazine. During Joseph “Erap” Estrada’s presidency, he was appointed as president of the Land Bank of the Philippines and continued to serve as such when Mrs. Arroyo took over as president.
Before that, he was known as the House of Representatives’s undisputed “resident economist” as the multiple-term representative of Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental province.
Teves, a very low-key and affable man who would rather let his actions do the talking than be involved in acrimonious debates, pointed out that it was, in fact, during GMA’s term that the foundation was laid for the country’s credit-rating ugrades.
He said that Fitch Ratings’s upgrade in March 2013 noted that it was Mrs. Arroyo’s “improvements in fiscal management…that made general government debt dynamics more resilient to shocks.”
Prudent management of the national debt and legislation in support of financial-market developments, like the reformed value-added tax, contributed to the strong fiscal performance of the country, which resulted in credit-outlook upgrades from negative to stable (during GMA’s term) and positive shortly after July 2010.
While Teves commended P-Noy for sustaining the economic growth started by his predecessor, he said there was a clear need for it to raise infrastructure spending from the current 3 percent to at least 5 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP.
He added that spending must also “focus investments on infrastructure bottlenecks that increase the cost of doing business.”
It was this part of his public statement that caught my eye, apart from his other suggestions that P-Noy should modernize agriculture, simplify the application process to build and operate power plants, and create a stable regulatory environment that honors contracts with investors, among others.
Huffed, puffed, heaved
IN previous columns, we have placed side by side the solid infrastructure accomplishment record of the Arroyo administration and that of P-Noy’s.
After laboring for four years, the current administration huffed, puffed and heaved to make its centerpiece Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Program take flight.
Unfortunately, the throng of direct investors it tried to attract did not come as expected. Now nearly at the end of its six-year term, the PPP Center tells us that only five infrastructure projects, out of the 55 projects in the PPP pipeline, would be finished or “deliverable” by the end of P-Noy’s current term.
The problem, obviously, is not the availability of funds. Think of the billions in various outlays that were spent for other purposes. In fact, there was a surfeit of funds—billions in discretionary funds that were spent for political purposes.
The problem seems to boil down to one thing: The lack of a well-planned and coordinated program that would have addressed the horrendous problems besetting our air and sea facilities, and inadequacies in our mass-transit systems. In Metro Manila alone, these problems have reached critical levels that are now causing the economy to lose billions of pesos a day.
As far as the building of new roads, highways, skyways, expressways, airports and seaports are concerned, there seems to be a total lack of coordination. The Department of Transportation and Communications, for example, doesn’t seem to see eye-to-eye with the Department of Public Works and Highways as to which infrastructure project already in the pipeline should be prioritized.
In short, they seem to be working at cross-purposes.
To be concluded on Wednesday
E-mail: omerta_bdc@yahoo.com.