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MANILA, Philippines – Even before Congress approved the government budget for 2021, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has begun planning to spend a record P5.024 trillion in 2022 to reactivate and hopefully stimulate the the country’s economy of P18.2 trillion. .
Budget Secretary Wendel Avisado said DBM will issue the budget calls next week for the 2022 spending schedule that will focus on health care as well as projects that would help the economy recover from its economy-induced recession. pandemic.
The country’s economic administrators had previously predicted that economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP), would contract by a record 8.5 percent to 9.5 percent this year due to COVID-19 quarantine measures.
But the economic team hopes that once a COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available, the economy will regain the P1.2 trillion it lost to the pandemic with growth from 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent and grow even further in 2022 by 8 percent to 10 percent, a feat never accomplished in the Philippine economic history.
Avisado did not specify how the Duterte administration hopes to achieve the feat in the months that remain in office, but the Secretary of Finance, Carlos Domínguez III, said that the national budget for next year, as well as the extension of the 2020 budget and the Bayanihan to recover as One Act, provides the government with around P213 billion still unspent for stimulus measures in 2021.
Greater stimulus pushed
Dominguez also said that the government would continue to control the budget deficit, which was set at 7.6 percent of GDP in 2020 from 9.6 percent previously.
Some economists and lawmakers have been pushing for more stimulus as the damage done by the pandemic to the economy was already enormous.
The Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) said on Friday that “for economies that experienced particularly severe recessions in the second quarter and prolonged outbreaks and lockdowns, estimates of the 2020 impact on consumption and investment are now older “.
“This is most evident for India and the Philippines, where 2020 consumption is expected to be 12-15 percent lower and investment about 25 percent lower than pre-COVID-19 expectations.” ADB said in a report titled “The Impact of COVID-19 on Asia’s Development: The Pandemic Extends to 2021.”
The Philippines’ GDP fell by a record 16.9 percent year-on-year during the second quarter, as the tightest lockdown in the region was imposed from mid-March to May, shutting down 75 percent of the economy, causing job losses and temporary business closures.
Assignment
In the 2021 budget still outstanding, 9.9 percent larger than the P4.1 trillion allocated for 2020, the agencies with the largest allocations were the Department of Education, the Department of Public Works and Highways, the Department of the Interior. and Local Government, the Department of National Defense, Department of Health, Department of Social Welfare and Development, Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, Judicial Branch, and Department of Labor and Employment.
Its volume, or 36.9 percent, was reserved for the social services sector worth P1.664 trillion.
The economic services sector will receive the second highest allocation at P1.347 trillion, or 29.9 percent of the budget. —WITH REPORT FROM LEILA B. SALAVERRIA
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