BETTER DAYS
The Senate Committee on Finance, of which I am chairman, recently concluded its deliberations on Senate Bill No. 2426 or the proposed Tatak Pinoy (Proudly Filipino) Act which aims to develop a strategy to encourage, support, and promote the production of more diverse, sophisticated, high quality and globally competitive Philippine products and services. This has been our advocacy over many years; in fact, we have been pushing for measures related to Tatak Pinoy including certain provisions under the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act particularly on giving preference to locally manufactured PPEs, credit assistance, loan programs for MSMEs, among others.
This can be seen in the Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives for Enterprises (CREATE) Act, where we proposed several amendments including providing greater incentives for investors - particularly those who will generate new knowledge and intellectual property licensed to the Philippines; and in mandating the Fiscal Incentives Review Board (FIRB) to adopt policies for developing and expanding the domestic supply chain and in promoting the diversification and sophistication of products. More recently, we also pushed for the bill institutionalizing the Shared Service Facilities program of the DTI, the Protected Geographical Indications bill, as well as the National Quality Infrastructure Development bill – all of which are geared towards further improving our country’s productivity.
Over the course of seven hearings and five technical working group meetings on the Tatak Pinoy bill, we highlighted the need for the country to have a structural transformation if we are to achieve our goals as contained in the eight-point socioeconomic agenda of this administration. We believe that this measure is very timely especially since President Marcos has been actively engaging with the private sector, which has a critical role in achieving the objectives of this measure. Throughout the numerous meetings and committee hearings, the majority of our resource persons were also from the private sector and industries such as creatives, manufacturing, tourism, MSMEs, culture, heritage and gastronomy, and agriculture, not only to get their positions and recommendations on the Tatak Pinoy bill, but also as a means to expand awareness to this advocacy in order to encourage them to fully buy into this initiative.
Ultimately, we hope that this Tatak Pinoy bill would serve as a unifying measure for both government and private stakeholders towards a common goal of producing better and more complex products and services – which in turn would yield better and higher paying jobs for Filipinos. Tatak Pinoy aims to provide a more coordinative strategy that is comprehensive, evidenced-based, and stakeholder-driven. Considering that the challenges the country faces today are so multi-faceted, overlapping, and far-reaching, clearly no single government agency could resolve these issues by themselves which is why coordination at the highest levels of government will also be critical to the success of Tatak Pinoy.
Tatak Pinoy is an offshoot of the research pioneered by Drs. Ricardo Hausmann and Cesar Hidalgo on economic complexity which measures a country’s economic growth by the diversity and sophistication of its productive capabilities. One particularly useful aspect about Hausmann and Hidalgo’s work was how they used big data analysis and creative visualizations to numerically calculate the economic complexity of a given country or economy. This enabled them to rank each country based on what has since been called the economic complexity index or ECI. Among those in the top are Japan, Switzerland, Chinese Taipei, South Korea and Germany. Meanwhile, based on the same index, the Philippines ranked 33rd which means that while we are far from the bottom, we still have a long way to go to be among those at the top.
Hence, the crux of our proposal is to mandate all the relevant government agencies through a Tatak Pinoy Council to work in tandem with the private sector in identifying gaps and ensuring that their individual efforts jive towards helping Filipino enterprises produce better products and offer world-class services, to create better jobs and income opportunities across the country.
A Tatak Pinoy Strategy shall also be formulated by the Council which will serve as the country’s action plan — as a supplement to the Philippine Development Plan — for incrementally and systematically expanding and diversifying the productive capabilities of domestic enterprises, and hence of our economy as a whole.
We are grateful to President Marcos for including this measure as one of his administration’s priority measures and we expect that this will be approved by both Houses of Congress soon-- seeing the value and importance of a coordinated action towards improving our goods and services. It is our hope that Tatak Pinoy can provide solutions to cross-cutting problems like poverty, inclusive growth, the growing trade and current account deficit, unemployment, underemployment, low salaries, and rural to urban migration, among many others. (Email: [email protected]| Facebook, Twitter & Instagram: @sonnyangara)
(Senator Sonny Angara has been in public service for 19 years — nine years as representative of the lone district of Aurora, and 10 as Senator. He has authored, co-authored, and sponsored more than 330 laws. He is currently serving his second term in the Senate.)