Written by Doy Santos aka The Cusp
In the first year of President Noynoy Aquino’s ascension into Malacanang, a revisit of the national development project was announced with the unveiling of the Philippine Development Plan 2011-2016 (aka The Plan).
To understand the way the Plan works, several points have to be made:
- The Plan identifies the lack of investment in physical and human capital as the main hindrance for fast, sustained and inclusive growth.
- This in turn is hampered by poor governance and insufficient revenues.
- For this reason, the chapters on infrastructural development, governance issues and social development would comprise the three most critical elements of the Plan. The rest are what it terms as ‘complementary strategies’.
- To address the infrastructure bottleneck, the idea is to use a zero based budgeting process and the public private partnerships model.
- This will be aided by a more competent and honest bureaucracy.
- This will spur greater industrial development, which will generate jobs and improve revenues.
- The increased flow of revenues will be allocated to more human, social, defense and environmental spending.
Its ten chapters make for more hefty reading material than the scant Social Contract adopted by the Liberal Party during the last election. The Contract was simply a collection of principles mixed in with a number of promises covering key election issues.
It starts off with an exposition of our underdevelopment problem in chapter 1 and a broad treatment of macroeconomic policy in chapter 2. The remaining chapters are divided into different sectoral and thematic topics. Three chapters are devoted to the industrial, agricultural, and financial sectors. The remaining five cover the physical, social, governance, safety, and environmental themes.
Read Part One here, and Part Two here.
Read more articles by Doy Santos:
50 by 30: The Philippines has committed to an ambitious renewable energy target of 50% by 2030, but is it up to the task?
Towards a Strategic Development Road Map (Update): The following is a matrix of the Strategies contained in the government’s Philippine Development Plan 2011-16 plotted against the five key results areas under the Cabinet Cluster system of the Aquino Cabinet.