NEDA sa Pasig
OPENING STATEMENT OF SEC. ARSENIO M. BALISACAN
Socioeconomic Planning Secretary and NEDA Director-General
Press Conference
Good morning.
Thank you very much for being here. I am happy to meet all of you. Some of you may already know that this is not my first time in government. Aside from my academic stint in the University of the Philippines, I was also appointed as Undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture in 2000 to 2001 and in 2003. When I met the President and personally heard his passion for good governance and leaving a good legacy for our children, it was impossible for me to say that I will not be willing to do my share. As dean of the UP School of Economics and a long-time student of the Philippine economy, I have been much disturbed by our country’s weak performance over the past dozen years in licking the poverty problem. One fundamental reason for this is the rather slow pace of economic growth relative to our population growth. Associated with this is the slow growth of high-quality employment opportunities for our rapidly growing labor force. The other fundamental reason is our weak capacity to transform whatever growth we achieve to poverty reduction. I share the view with our President that we need to permanently break away from this pattern of growth, making development more inclusive, ensuring that it benefits everyone, especially the poor and the highly vulnerable groups in our society. The President fully understands that this involves bringing development and economic opportunities beyond Manila, an understanding that parallels my scholarly works on poverty.
I am grateful and honored for the President’s trust and confidence in appointing me to this position. And this has been my marching order: to address the critical constraints that make growth slow, uneven and exclusive to certain sectors of society. Certainly, the Philippine economy is growing, but we need to make it grow faster and to sustain high growth for the long term. There is also no question that we need the growth to be more inclusive, across and within sectors and areas of the country.
The Philippine Development Plan for 2011 to 2016 already provides the broad strokes of our medium-term direction and strategies. Our task now in NEDA is to ensure that the Plan is implemented. At this stage, we shall monitor how our various development programs have contributed toward attaining poverty reduction and rural development, which is for me the essence of inclusive growth.
Another task is to facilitate the pace of and address the bottlenecks in building high quality infrastructure, especially those that support rural development. Infrastructure support is clearly linked with poverty reduction. The public-private partnership (PPP) program is just one of the many tools to achieve this goal. We will continue the initial strides of the PPP Center, and we hope to further make PPP projects attractive to investors even in rural areas.
NEDA will also continue to advocate for evidence-based policy making. This is the rationale why agencies such as the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) and the National Statistics Office (NSO) are attached under NEDA. As we seek to improve the delivery of policy advice based on compelling evidence and data, we will also continue to seek government support for our statistical agencies. Ultimately, we hope that our policy makers would embrace evidence-based policy making.
In general, it is my thrust to lead NEDA in reasserting its leadership in development planning and policy making and responding to the demands of stakeholders in terms of data analyses and processing of coherent information. I hope that NEDA will continue to be more proactive in the discussions, design and development of effective strategies that lead towards poverty reduction.
We need to do more, and we may probably need to reinvent ourselves. In order to do that, I also need to immerse myself first with the various functions, expertise and demands of the offices within NEDA.
It is a great opportunity to work with NEDA and be back in government. I also hope to get to know you — each one of the members of the NEDA beat, as I buckle up to work in the next few days.
Thank you very much.
MR No. 2012-039,
17 May 2012
