BENEL D. LAGUA
According to a World Bank report, the growth potential of the micro, small, and medium enterprises in the Philippines has not been fully leveraged. Among the indicators cited in support of that view are, low rate of business entry (the Philippines is among the bottom 15 percent of countries with the lowest rate of newly registered firms), low productivity (labor productivity of MSMEs is about one-third of that in Malaysia and one-twentieth of the MSME sector in high–income countries), and failure of most MSMEs to grow (the 2009 World Bank Enterprise survey showed that after three years only one percent of micro-sized firms moved to the medium-sized category.