DTI touts strong showing of actual foreign investment vs pledges

TRADE Secretary Ramon M. Lopez on Tuesday said he expects the foreign direct investment (FDI) to be “positive” in the next data release of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), even as he qualified that the data presented by the agency is “not the total investment picture.”

Preliminary PSA data show that approved FDI pledges — which are commitments until they materialize — registered with the country’s seven investment promotion agencies (IPAs) fell 12.8% to P22.883 billion in the first quarter from P26.243 billion approved in 2016’s comparable three months.

The decline was the third straight quarter of contraction after the 45% and 9.3% drops recorded in the third and fourth quarters of last year.

But in a chance interview in Malacañang yesterday, Mr. Lopez told reporters to ignore PSA’s data on FDI, saying the findings were only “indicative” and that people should stick to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ (BSP) tracking of actual FDI inflows, which posted positive growth as of endMarch.

“Don’t mind that,” the Trade chief said of PSA’s first quarter FDI data. “That’s not the total investment picture. There are many investments that are not going into the IPAs.”

Asked about his projections for the PSA’s second quarter FDI data, Mr. Lopez said: “It will rise. What’s important is the investment commitments with the BoI.”

The seven IPAs are the Board of Investments (BoI), Clark Development Corporation ( CDC), Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA), Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority ( SBMA), Authority of the Freeport Area of Bataan (AFAB), BoI-Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BoI-ARMM) and Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA).

FDI that actually came in during the first quarter — tracked separately by the central bank — climbed 16.6% to $ 1.56 billion, an increase economists have attributed to the country’s generally sound macroeconomic fundamentals.

IPAs are government agencies that by law are authorized to grant tax and non-tax incentives to investors putting up businesses or expanding existing ones in the country. —