Appreciating life, family, and friends

By

* BusinessWorld October 24, 2022.
--------------

Today is a special day for me and I want to thank, appreciate, and mention certain groups and people who have helped me all these years.

But before that, I want to mention the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Finance Ministers Meeting (FMM) held on Oct. 19 and 20 in Bangkok, Thailand. This seems to have escaped the coverage of many local business reports.

The period 2020-2022 have been years of severe fiscal challenges for practically all countries around the world. Finding new revenues, cutting certain expenditures and subsidies, reducing borrowings while controlling inflation and encouraging fast growth are multiple challenges that responsible governments must address.

Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno attended the APEC-FMM and in his panel on “Digitalization for Fiscal Policy and Efficient Tax Collection,” he mentioned that the Philippines’ online filing and payment even improved collections amid the pandemic — a 5% increase in the number of tax payers, an 84% increase in electronic payments in 2021, and revenue collections expanded by 5.2% that year. Collections from January to August 2022 grew by 18% compared to the same period in 2021.

I support with caution the rapid shift to digital commerce and payment system. It is faster, convenient, and more transparent. But caution should be put in place when governments have more data about people and companies because when authoritarian leaders and political parties rise in power in any country, they will definitely weaponize the digital information for their political repression and economic central planning agenda.

The Finance, Budget, and Economic departments can use the digital information to rationalize the expanding welfare system. If some people are added to the system, some must get out and their subsidies should not be forever.

Now, I have 10 groups of people to say a big “Thank you” to...

Ten, the economic team of the Marcos Jr. administration. I still believe that they are the most experienced, most respected economists and the most cohesive team to instill more business confidence in the country.

Thank you, friends and family.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cancer spending and the budget

By
Image
*  BusinessWorld  April 12, 2023. ----------- The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) released today an update on causes of deaths in the Philippines for the period January-November 2022. I expanded the data backwards until 2017 so six years and saw some interesting trends. One, COVID deaths, both with identified and unidentified virus, have shrunk greatly, from 13.8% of total deaths in 2021 — when it was the second biggest cause of death next to ischemic heart diseases — to only 2.8% in 2022. Two, cancer deaths declined significantly, from 11.1% of the total in 2019 to only 7.8% in 2021, then up to 10.2% in 2022. Three, pneumonia deaths also declined significantly, from 10.1% of the total in 2019 to only 4.2% in 2021 — wow! It was up to 4.8% in 2022. Four, lower respiratory plus tuberculosis (TB) deaths combined declined from 7.9% in 2019 to only 4.9% in 2021, then up to 6.1% in 2022 (see the Table). My suspicion is that the number of COVID deaths were exaggerated — by labeling many
Read more

On LBP-DBP merger and MUP pension reforms

By
Image
*  BusinessWorld  March 29, 2023. ------------- Yesterday, Department of Finance (DoF) Secretary Benjamin E. Diokno held a press briefing with the Malacañang press corps and shared his presentations in a meeting with President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. Two big announcements, two big issues were discussed in one briefing. One is the proposed merger of the Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP) and the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) with LBP as the surviving entity, the other was the military and uniformed personnel (MUP) pension reforms. Both the LBP and DBP are under the Finance department while getting money to fund the MUP pension is a DoF function, or headache. At the onset, I support these two important reforms and I hope the public will also support them. There are at least four reasons that the LBP-DBP merger will be favorable to the public. One, the merger will create a bigger, stronger, more resilient government bank while contributing to the reduction in the size of the
Read more

Year 1 of Marcos Jr.: GDP growth and agriculture

By
Image
Year 1 of Marcos Jr.: GDP growth and agriculture July 20, 2023 | 12:02 am My Cup of Liberty By Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr. https://www.bworldonline.com/opinion/2023/07/20/534979/year-1-of-marcos-jr-gdp-growth-and-agriculture/ (Last of 4 parts) This column attempts to make an independent assessment of year 1 economic performance of the Marcos Jr. administration. Part 1 discussed the budget deficit and unemployment, part 2 assessed inflation and interest rates, part 3 tackled trade and investments, and this part 4 will review the overall GDP performance and the agriculture sector. Regular readers of this column will have some basic economic data when President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. delivers his second State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Monday. I wrote a nine-page paper for Stratbase-Albert Del Rosario Institute (ADRi) that was released yesterday, “An Assessment of the Economic Performance of the Marcos Jr. Administration During its First Year,” Stratbase-ADRi Occasional Paper, July 2023
Read more