The government is likely to revisit its growth targets for the year amid a tamer than expected inflation in September, according to Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman.
Speaking at the sidelines of the launch of the government’s Public Finance Management (PFM) reform roadmap, Pangandaman said the government’s economic team was “very happy” about the development, specially with “all reforms taking place now.”
“It’s a success, obviously. The (reduced) tariff (on rice), all our other interventions. I hope we can sustain the inflation,” she said.
Pangandaman said while the government wants its growth target achieved, she has asked the economic team for a possible special meeting of the target-setting Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) to look at the numbers.
“It’s a special meeting, off-cycle meeting. Maybe this quarter, specially that the budget is going to be passed soon. So maybe we can review again our targets and hopefully we will catch up on all the targets that we have,” she said.
The government targets a GDP growth of 6 to 7 percent this year. In the first half, the economy grew 6 percent.
Headline inflation in September eased to a four-year low of 1.9 percent.
On Monday’s launch of the PFM reform roadmap, funded for $500 million by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Pangandaman expressed optimism on the program’s benefit in speeding up initiatives that will allow fast deployment of resources, addressing roadblocks in the process.
“For one, it will expedite the adoption of the integrated financial management information system or IFMIS across all government agencies, to ensure seamless and efficient government transactions,” Pangandaman said.
IFMIS will be rolled out by the first batch of agencies in December, she added.
“Using the application’s programming interface, we will establish data highways that will enable the linkage and data exchange between existing separate systems to a core central system, the budget and treasury management system or BTMS. The BTMS, which we also hope to launch this quarter, will then facilitate real-time online accounting monitoring and oversight of obligations and disbursements which are vital for making informed decisions about managing our government resources,” she said.
Pangandaman said the PFM reforms roadmap also outlines “crucial outcomes, interventions and activities within 11 strategic focus areas, leaving no areas for improvement and turn and to ensure that all these are accounted for.”
“To name a few of our reforms, we will harmonize public investment management policies and guidelines and enhance information technology systems for planning and budgeting. We will also sustain citizen participatory audit for public expenditures and scale up our efforts in conducting performance audits to strengthen internal controls and public expenditure and revenue accounting,” she said.
“Further, we will work towards empowering the PFM workforce across national government agencies, government owned or controlled corporations and local government units by updating the current PFM competency program, developing e-learning materials and tutorials and establishing a PFM Institute,” she added.
The PFM reform is a key part of ADB’s support for economic and social transformation plan in the Philippine Development Plan 2023″’2028.
The funding will go into laying the foundation for strengthening PFM systems to foster private sector participation in public investments and address climate change.
Pavit Ramachandran, ADB Philippines country director, said the successful implementation of the PFM reform roadmap will lead to the effective delivery of development projects under the ADB’s $24 billion Philippine Strategy Program for 2024-2029.
“Across all of these projects, PFM is really going to be foundational to ensure that budgets are properly utilized and service delivery levels are commensurate with what’s needed,” he said.
