DOF: High ratings drowned out negative chatter

The highly positive results of re­cent surveys on President Duterte’s policies have affirmed that an over­whelming majority of Filipinos are oblivious to the negative political up­roar and are appreciative of his efforts in his first three months in office to make good on his promise to restore peace and order, sustain the growth momentum, and bring the benefits of our fast-growing economy to all Filipinos, the Department of Finance (DOF) said.

“Certain groups advancing their narrow and selfish partisan interests have failed to drown out with their political chatter the initial accom­plishments of President Duterte, which includes not only his tough campaign versus crime and illegal drugs, but [also] a well-crafted tax reform program designed to help re­alize his campaign commitment to attack poverty and make high growth inclusive for all,” said DOF Spokes­man Paola Alvarez.

“This should serve as a wake-up call to the President’s critics that most Filipinos are impervious to their polit­ical chatter and that they would do our country a lot of good by just support­ing the new government’s ambitious efforts to rapidly reduce poverty and transform the Philippines into an up­per middle-income country by 2022 and a high-income economy in one generation or by 2040,” she added.

The most recent “Ulat ng Bayan” survey of Pulse Asia showed that 8 out of 10—or 86 percent of all Filipinos— trust Mr. Duterte, while 11 percent were undecided and 3 percent disap­proved the President’s performance. The Pulse Asia poll showed that 93 percent of the people in Mind­anao approved the performance of the President; the figure was 88 per­cent in the Visayas and 84 in Luzon.

Recently, the Social Weath­er Station (SWS) came out with its own survey showing that 83 per­cent of the people gave an “excel­lent” net trust rating on Mr. Duterte. In a September 24-to-27 survey conducted by the SWS among 1,200 respondents nationwide, Mr. Duterte also obtained a +65 percent net satis­faction rating, besting those received by his post-Edsa 1986 predecessors, save for former President Fidel V. Ra­mos, who got a +66 net rating in 1992. Mr. Duterte’s ratings were either “excellent” or “very good” across all regions, socioeconomic classes, gen­ders and age groups, the SWS survey showed.

Alvarez noted that Mr. Duterte got an “excellent” rating, particularly in Mindanao, because of his deci­sive moves to include Mindanaoans in the Cabinet and his regular trips to Davao City and elsewhere in the South, “which prove his com­mitment to truly devolve political power and growth from Mega Ma­nila to the country’s other regions.”

She said the President’s center­piece 10-point socioeconomic agenda on inclusive growth was also well-re­ceived by foreign institutions like the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which remain bullish on the Philippines’ growth momentum under his presidency.

The WB has even pointed out that the Philippines’s economic growth could surpass current fore­casts should the President Duterte make good on his commitments to maintain the country’s sound mac­roeconomic policies and accelerate infrastructure spending to help cut the poverty rate from 26 per­cent to 17 percent by 2022.

Even local business groups such as the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) and the Em­ployers Confederation of the Philippines (ECOP) are sat­isfied with the three-month performance of the Duterte administration, which has al­ready submitted a tax-reform package to the Congress that responds to most of their con­cerns on tax policy and ad­ministration.

“The President, through the DOF, has submitted Pack­age One of his comprehensive tax-reform package to Con­gress in less than 90 days in office.

This sense of urgency in reforming our decades-old tax system illustrates the Duterte administration’s commitment to raise enough funds for its 10-point socioeconomic agen­da of sustaining economic growth, and more importantly, making sure that it finally ben­efits all Filipinos,” Alvarez said.

Alvarez said Mr. Dute­rte’s high ratings show that, for all the political noise lately, the Filipino people’s trust and confidence in the President remain high and that they are satisfied with his govern­ment’s initial feats in support of his 10-point socioeconom­ic agenda that aims to free 10 million Filipinos from pov­erty and transform the Phil­ippines into an upper mid­dle-income economy by the time he leaves office in 2022. “Obviously, Filipinos are aware of this and believe that meaningful change is indeed, coming, given the President’s initial accomplishments in just three months in office,” she added.

Finance Secretary Car­los Dominguez III said the 10-point socioeconomic agenda aims not only to com­bat generational poverty but also to sustain high growth by, among other things, sharpen­ing the country’s global com­petitiveness to entice more in­vestors to do business here.

This is why the new gov­ernment has jumpstarted over the past three months a vast array of initiatives to improve the ease of doing business in the country and reverse the sharp decline in the Philip­pines’ ranking in the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s global competitiveness list in the last year of the former Aquino presidency, Domin­guez said.

“Alongside reducing the poverty incidence by 9 per­centage points over the next six years, the new govern­ment has given top priority to sharpening the Philippines’ global competitiveness, pre­cisely to improve the ease of doing business here and turn our country into a magnet for investments on the Dute­rte watch,” Dominguez said. Meanwhile, Finance Un­dersecretary Gil Beltran not­ed that the Philippines slipped in the recently released World Economic Forum (WEF) competitiveness index partly as a result of its low ranking in infrastructure, which incurred a massive backlog during the Aquino administration as a result of underspending the budget.

Beltran also pointed out that this year’s WEF assess­ment for its global compet­itiveness list was conducted prior to the May 2016 elec­tions, or long before President Duterte took over following his landslide victory at the polls. “The increased spending in infrastructure, which will account for 5 percent of GDP under the Duterte presidency, will be a significant factor in boosting the country’s rank­ing in the WEF index,” Beltran said.

“The Duterte administra­tion aims to reverse the decline in the Philippines’ WEF com­petitiveness rating that hap­pened in the final year of the Aquino presidency, resulting primarily from the business community’s nagging con­cerns over their perceived bu­reaucratic inefficiencies, poor infrastructure, official corrup­tion and tax issues,” he added.

The Philippines’ ranking fell from 47th in 2015 to 57th this year in the WEF’s Glob­al Competitiveness Report, which is an annual WEF as­sessment of factors affecting productivity and growth in 138 countries.

In this year’s compet­itiveness report, WEF said the Top 5 most problemat­ic factors for doing business in the Philippines have to do with the inefficient bureau­cracy, inadequate supply of infrastructure, corruption, tax rates, and tax regulations.Dominguez has pointed out that the very first directive by the President in his State of the Nation Address in July was for all government agencies to cut red tape as a way to speed up the processing of permits and other official documents in the bureaucracy, delays of which have been a perennial complaint of individuals and businesses in previous admin­istrations.

To close the infrastructure backlog, he said the Duterte administration has decided to relax deficit spending from 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the Aquino administration to 3 percent of GDP from hereon, to help Malacañang accelerate spend­ing on its three pro-poor and growth-friendly priorities of public infrastructure, human capital development, and so­cial protection for the most vulnerable sectors of society. LUIS LEONCIO