Budget delay ‘missed’ chance to uplift poor
Credit to Author: MAYVELIN U. CARABALLO, TMT| Date: Mon, 27 May 2019 16:25:38 +0000
Late approval example of harmful ‘politicking’ – Finance chief
THE government had “missed the opportunity” to generate thousands of jobs and reduce poverty in the first three months of the year because of the delayed approval of the 2019 national budget, key departments told lawmakers on Monday.
The “reenacted budget during the first quarter led the government to miss the opportunity to create as many as 260,000 to 320,000 more jobs, affecting the construction, public administration and defense, wholesale and retail trade, land transport, and education sectors,” the Budget and Finance departments and the National Economic and Development Authority said in a joint statement read by Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez 3rd during a Senate finance committee briefing.
The budget reenactment, he added, also derailed poverty-reduction efforts, where as many as 420,000 more Filipinos could have been taken out of poverty.
“This is a clear example of how politicking could harm our people,” Dominguez said.
A dispute between the Senate and the House of Representatives over alleged insertions resulted in the four-and-a-half-month delay of the passage of this year’s budget. This forced the government
to run on last year’s budget, limiting it to spend for items detailed in the 2018 outlay and not on programs and projects supposed to be implemented this year.
This put total national government spending in January to March — which include expenditures for infrastructure and capital outlay, maintenance, personnel services and subsidies — at P778
billion, up 0.8 percent or P6 billion from the amount in the same period last year.
According to Dominguez, the delay caused the government to underspend a great amount daily in the first three months.
If only the budget was approved on time, he said, the economy could have grown by 1 percent every month or above 6 percent for this year.
“Despite the delay of one full quarter in the execution of our 2019 fiscal program, we are doing our best to hurry up the execution of delayed projects,” the Finance chief told the senators.
He said he and the rest of country’s economic managers would formulate a carefully crafted and bold expenditure catch-up plan to enable the economy to hit a gross domestic product growth rate of above 6 percent this year.
“This is to substantially offset the lower spending in the first quarter resulting from both the budget delay and the election ban on public works,” the Finance chief said.
The Finance chief assured the legislators that the country’s economic team would do its best to restore last year’s upward growth momentum.
“But we cannot do this alone. This is a shared responsibility. I hope that everyone will do their part, as well,” he said.
WITH JAVIER JOE ISMAEL
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