DOMINGUEZ: GROWTH GOALS WITHIN REACH

The head of the Duterte administration’s economic team is confident that the growth targets for 2019 and 2020 will be both achieved as the government catches up on its spending this year while next year’s budget was expected to be passed on time.

“We believe that we’ll most likely hit the lower end of our 6-7 percent target [for 2019] and it looks like our continuous monitoring of projects and removal of the bottlenecks are paying off. The two big infrastructure departments are doing their utmost and quite achieving a good percentage of their targets,” Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III told reporters Thursday night after the Economic Development Cluster (EDC) meeting where they discussed the spending catch-up plan.

Dominguez said that at end-october, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) already released almost 100 percent of the P3.7-trillion 2019 budget to implementing agencies, such that spending was expected to further speed up before the end of the year.

In the first 10 months, government spending on infrastructure and other capital outlays amounted P628.5 billion, which was almost three-fourths of the full-year program of P859.5 billion, Dominguez said.

However, Dominguez admitted that end-october infrastructure spending declined 5.5 percent compared to last year.

“The contraction recorded in the disbursements for infrastructure and capital outlays were mainly due to the delay of the passage of the 2019 national budget and election ban. To attain our target disbursement of P3.77 trillion in 2019, the government needs to disburse P832 billion or 22 percent for the remaining two months of the year,” Dominguez said.