BETTER DAYS
During the recently-concluded International Trade Forum held in Taguig City, the Marcos administration unveiled its Philippine Export Development Plan 2023 to 2028 (PEDP), a comprehensive strategy on how to grow our exports and make it at par with our neighboring countries and even the rest of the world. In launching the PEDP, Trade Secretary Alfredo Pascual, who serves as the chairman of the Export Development Council, emphasized the need to unleash the vast export potential of the Philippines by cultivating an environment that fosters business growth and enables our producers to increase the output of quality products and services; empowering industries to flourish in a dynamic global landscape; leveraging the full spectrum of our preferential trade arrangements; protecting the visibility of our products and services in the international stage; attracting more investments; and enhancing, expanding and diversifying our production capabilities to meet the discerning needs of foreign markets and evolving global supply chains.
In his address during the event, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said the implementation of key strategies to nurture the growth of the export sector will pave the way for its transformation into a strong and highly competitive pillar of our economy. Listening to the President’s speech, what stood out to me was his observation that Philippine exports, while continuously growing, is still lagging behind our ASEAN neighbors and a lot of this has to do with the lack of diversity in our export portfolio.
The release of the new PEDP is a very welcome development as it is intrinsically tied to our Tatak Pinoy or Proudly Filipino advocacy, which we have been espousing since 2019. Inspired by the Atlas of Economic Complexity of Dr. Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard University and Dr. Cesar Hidalgo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which analyzed the productive capabilities of countries based on the products that it exports and how this affects the growth of their economies. Over the past three years, our office has conducted extensive research on our country’s productive capability, the type of products that we export, the potential of growth of our industries and what our government has been doing to foster better growth and competitiveness among businesses and service providers of all sizes.
Among other things, we saw that the Philippines produces a lot of components that are being used to manufacture complex products such as automobiles, aircraft, and robotics. It confirms what the President noted about how one sector takes up around 40 percent of our entire export basket. There is enormous potential for growth in our exports sector. With the right kind of support, I believe we will be able to produce a bigger basket of goods and gradually move towards exporting more complex, high-value products.
By aiming to be competent in producing and offering complex or sophisticated products and services, a country empowers itself to branch out into other forms of complex production and economic activity, thereby jumpstarting a virtuous cycle where high-paying, “good” jobs are generated.
We are elated to have the President and his entire economic team on the same page with us on this common desire to diversify our exports. This will now put this push for economic complexity at the front and center of the government’s policies and we will provide all the support we can on this effort. We intend to carefully examine the new PEDP and see what interventions are needed on the part of the Senate in order to achieve the Marcos administration’s goal of transforming Philippine exports into a significant economic engine that will increase the country’s total value of exports from this year’s target of $127 billion to over $240 billion by 2028 and generating over a million high quality and sustainable jobs.
The Philippines has a wealth of talent and expertise in various fields as evidenced by the move of several major multinational companies to locate in the country, including those that produce highly-sophisticated products. Filipino engineers, scientists, creatives and other professionals are sought after overseas so if there are sufficient, good paying jobs for their fields of expertise here in the country, then they would no longer have to find work abroad and we can utilize their talents here for the benefit of our local economy.
This is what Tatak Pinoy is all about — finding ways to help our entrepreneurs and industries to improve their processes and innovate so that they can produce products that are more sophisticated or complex and improve their competitiveness, particularly in the world market and consequently, provide more opportunities for our people. ([email protected]| Facebook, Twitter & Instagram: @sonnyangara)
(Senator Sonny Angara has been in public service for 18 years — nine years as Representative of the lone district of Aurora, and nine as Senator. He has authored, co-authored, and sponsored more than 330 laws. He is currently serving his second term in the Senate.)