Filipino-Chinese businessmen Monday, (March 22) strongly batted on the importance of continued government economic stimulus as they stressed that the restoration of restrictions and temporary suspension of certain economic activities, especially in the construction sector, will adversely impact the Duterte administration’s Build Build Build (BBB) program and further derail economic recovery.

Speaking at the “Tapatan” forum, Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry Inc. (FFCCCII) President Henry Lim Bon Liong said economic stimulus is necessary even as he acknowledged that the government is running out of funds for a third economic stimulus package. Congress is crafting a third economic stimulus package or Bayanihan 3.

Businessman Jeffrey Ng, president of the UP School of Economics Alumni Association and Association for Philippines-China Understanding, said the restrictions that are imposed on many construction sites will derail the BBB projects.

“Many construction sites can only work with 50 percent capacity. This is a big constraint on going full blast for BBB,” he added.

“With all restrictions on workers, work requirements, then it's really difficult for the economy to achieve take off, achieve the level of growth that we were used to in the past 10 years before last year’s pandemic,” he said.

To help enterprises, Ng urged the government to be “more judicious, more resourceful in sourcing local and foreign funding” to help save distressed micro and small enterprises back on their feet.

Ng explained that a government stimulus is not just mere “doleouts” and that government is not throwing away money as the stimulus would be in the form of loans for affected businesses because the big banks are not lending to micro and small entrepreneurs.

“Government should continue the stimulus to help save the tens of thousand of micro, small and medium enterprises throughout the country that are really struggling,” he said.

One form of stimulus, he said, is for the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas to maintain its historic low interest rate regime, now at 2 percent. He also expressed support for the importation of pork to help ease supply shortage and curb the rising prices of pork and arrest the elevated inflation rate in the country.

Ng, however, said that the country’s gross domestic product is expected to post positive growth this second to third quarters this year because the severe lockdown in the second and third quarter periods last year resulted in negative GDP. With the gradual reopening, he said, “There is no way, but up.”

Lim also said that FFCCCII is not just advocating the BBB but also the Plant Plant Plant. Without the BBB, PPP and no reinvestments from businessmen, Lim said, it would be difficult to survive.

The federation, which groups all the Filipino-Chinese chambers in the country, also expects to forge its proposed tripartite agreement with government and the vaccine supplier next month for their importation of 500,000 doses of Sinovac vaccines for its economic frontliners.

Lim explained that their civic project is similar with other good private sector initiatives of Presidential Adviser on Entrepreneurship Joey Concepcion of GoNegosyo, businessman Ricky Razon and pharmaceutical firm Unilab to help secure more vaccines for the country.

“We at FFCCCII have proposed this civic project on vaccines to lessen the government’s burden, to safeguard our economic frontliners, and to manifest our strong support for the national vaccination program against the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said.

I think interest rate will be maintained by the bsp because it's already at a low time high, historic low. In fact, 2% savers already getting negative interest rates, with the inflation at 4%.

And the government is doing its best to lower the level of inflation by allowing more importation of pork products from other countries, because as you know, there is a raging Asian swine flu disease killing 70% of pugs in luzon already.

And this is what caused the shortage of pork. So the government is going to allow importers to bring in the supply of pork, and this should probably reduce the shortage of pork and thus lower our rate of inflation to certain extent in the coming months until the end of the year.

And I believe, until such time that we achieve herd immunity until such time that 70 million Filipinos are actually vaccinated, and we completely lift all restrictions on movement, work restrictions

me Yeah, I think the second quarter should be positive, simply because of the severe lockdown in the second quarter of last year, the GDP were negative 15% last year, so it really has nowhere to go but to go up in the second quarter, for sure we will have positive GDP on the second quarter.

So the pandemic has shown that the level of health system in the country leaves to be desired.

Government has to invest a lot more especially up to the current level.

Our health system can stand more competition. And like Philhealth is already almost running out of funds, the government probably would have to infuse new budget into Philhealth at the same time probably the premium on philhealth members might have to be increased, just to make sure that the system is viable in the months and years ahead.