TO ADDRESS issues that have led to the decline in the Philippine’s rankings in different global competitiveness reports, the National Competitiveness Council will be adding two more working groups.
In his yearend message, NCC private sector chairman Guillermo Luz said they have added the National Quality Infrastructure and the Philippine Services groups to the NCC.
This year, they will be setting up a group for science and technology to address the gaps in innovation.
He noted that from 2011 to 2014, the Philippines managed to improve in seven of 12 global competitiveness reports that the NCC tracks. These include significant leaps in the rankings of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, the Global Enabling Report, the World Bank and International Finance Corp.’s Doing Business Report, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index and Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index. As for the reports that showed sliding results, Luz found this an opportunity to strive for changes.
Need for improvement
“The declines...point to the need for improvements in areas like infrastructure, education, research and development, and disaster response,” Luz said.
Luz said that the country has shown vast improvements in indicators like control of corruption, political stability and absence of violence. However, he said the Philippines “started from such a low base” that reform programs in these areas need to be accelerated. He also warned that the country has been showing signs of stagnation on indicators that measure government effectiveness, which means a need to renew efforts to better deliver public services.
Good governance
He said the NCC has laid groundwork for projects that aim to institutionalize good governance practices. The Islands of Good Governance campaign with the Institute of Solidarity in Asia started as a balanced scorecard system of six government agencies.
Today, he said more than 20 national government agencies and local government units have subjected themselves to an external audit. They plan to showcase the results this year.
Luz also mentioned that policies in the national, departmental and local levels make it difficult to reduce to cost of compliance and enforcement, which makes the effective delivery of public services more difficult. He said the NCC is studying an idea that they are calling “Project Repeal” to identify outdated laws that need to be repealed. They plan to organize a team to implement this in partnership with the House of Representatives.
“Maintaining that focus on implementation will be the country’s biggest challenge.
Infrastructure and transport bottlenecks this past holiday season have shown us what can happen when there is poor planning and implementation.”
Luz said these surveys serve as performance standards for government service and he hopes it helps build a culture of competitiveness and benchmarking among government offices. “Ultimately, this competitive mindset is what will drive the Philippines to the top third of global rankings.”