By BERNIE CAHILES-MAGKILAT
The Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) is taking its own initiative to create a technical working group (TWG) to review its present sources of income and formulate new income streams in line with its support to the Department of Finance’s revenue efforts.
Director General Charito B. Plaza announced this as she reported that PEZA has generated ₱109.193 billion investments as of November 2019.
The agency also created a total of 1,572,510 jobs and $45.340 billion of exports as of October 2019.
PEZA did not give any comparative figures.’
She explained that the creation of a TWG aims to enhance and discover new ‘income streams’ and contribute to the DOF more sources of revenues to finance President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s Build, Build, Build and other economic agenda.
“As we welcome the New Year, we remain steadfast in our mandate to generate investments, employment for Filipinos, and export income for our economy,” said Plaza.
According to Plaza, “It’s not just creating new sources of revenues but, in enhancing PEZA’s ‘good governance’ goals that provides efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness and credibility to investors, the national government, the LGUs and the people in general as PEZA’s stakeholders.”
As a self-reliant, self-sustaining and resource-generating agency, she said, PEZA continues to contribute high dividends to the Philippines since 1995.
Likewise, the agency increased the income and classification of the economic zone host LGUs such as the CALABARZON region, Baguio City, Lapu-Lapu City and other Cebu LGUs, Iloilo City, and Angeles, Pampanga, allowing them to enjoy social progress, low poverty, and crime incidence province.
There are now 404 operating economic zones in the country composed of: 74 of these are manufacturing economic zones, 286 are IT parks and centers, 22 agro-industrial economic zones mostly in Mindanao, 19 tourism economic zones, and 3 medical tourism parks. Four are public ecozones while there are 396 privately-developed ecozones. The number of registered enterprises likewise increased from 313 in 1995 to 4,478 as of September 2019.