WITH a new administration making the usual reassuring noise about supporting the country's micro, small and medium enterprise sector, a recent report from the Asian Development Bank's Southeast Asian Development Solutions (Seads) department is most timely, and something the Philippines' designated MSME policy experts should study most carefully.

The study was a synthesis of a number of small business surveys conducted in March-April 2020 and the same period in 2021 in Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines and Thailand. From the results, Seads identifies four key mistakes made by the MSMEs during the Covid-19 pandemic. These common errors stand out because they are all in some way either encouraged by typical MSME policy thinking here, or aggravated by it.

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