In light of the socioeconomic fallout caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Duterte administration’s ambitious “Build, Build, Build” program may be reconfigured to prioritize health
Presidential adviser for flagship programs and projects Vivencio Dizon told the Inquirer last week that he agreed with Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III’s earlier pronouncement that the administration would sustain massive infrastructure buildup to facilitate immediate recovery of the domestic economy once COVID-19 has been contained.
“Having said that, we have to reassess available sources of financing given the resetting of priorities toward the COVID-19 response as well as long-term health care infrastructure because this problem is not going away any time soon and will linger for a long time,” Dizon added. For its part, the AIIB plans to offer loans to build more health infrastructure across the region, which Dominguez had said the Philippines wanted to tap.In the case of the Philippines’ bilateral partners in infrastructure rollout such as China, Japan and South Korea, these countries are also grappling with their own domestic COVID-19 outbreaks and may set aside the grant of official development assistance in the meantime.
Dizon nonetheless noted that “the silver lining here is that interest rates are at an all-time low and unlike countries that are highly leveraged, the Philippines has a relatively low debt-to-gross domestic product ratio, which means we have a lot of room to borrow and avail [ourselves] of the cheap financing available and plan a more aggressive response to this.”“A huge part of this response [to the COVID-19 pandemic] is going to be public infrastructure,” Dizon said.
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