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THE technical working group of the
Philippine Development Forum (PDF) said Manila must speed up efforts
to liberalize the cement industry and state-owned power generation
assets to promote competition and pull down costs, the World Bank
said Friday.
Joachim von
Amsberg, World Bank country director for the Philippines and PDF
co-chairman, said besides civil air transport, ports and shipping,
the working group has identified cement production as in need of
more opening up.
“The lack of
effective competition hurts consumers and small and medium
enterprises [SMEs] and discourages entry and investment by domestic
start-ups and foreign investors,” he added.
As an example,
he cited the deregulation of the telecom industry as a move that
increased job creation in the Philippine information technology and
business process out-sourcing industry.
Von Amsberg
said the working group also welcomed plans to accelerate the
privatization of generation assets this year, including the
privatization of the National Transmission Corp.
“Such
privatization can promote competition in [the] Wholesale Electricity
Sport Market, augmenting long-term power supply capacity, and
yielding operational efficiencies and ultimately cost reduction,”
the World Bank chief said.
He said
participants, however, expressed concern that the country’s high
population growth rate was increasing the challenge of achieving
broad based growth and poverty reduction, and urged the national
government to exert more effort in implementing population control
policies.
“Currently,
the burden of population management is on local governments. There
needs to be more efforts for concrete solutions and partnerships to
operationalize more effective population policies,” he said.
Amsberg added
that the participants lauded the government’s drive to pour more
money into public investment while meeting its fiscal targets
through the strengthening of its tax collection efforts.
“To boost
administrative effort in the Bureau of Internal Revenue, targets
under the ongoing tax reform administration group have been
identified and will be monitored, high-profile case under the ‘Run
After Tax Evaders’ and ‘Run After The Smugglers’ would be
prosecuted and bottlenecks to prosecution identified,” he said.
 --Darwin
G. Amojelar
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