Government seeks P4.5-trillion budget for 2021
MANILA, Philippines — The Duterte administration will ask Congress to appropriate P4.506 trillion, 9.9-percent bigger than this year’s P4.1-trillion budget, to fund government efforts to address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, the President’s penultimate year in office.
The Department of Budget and Management announced on Sunday that President Rodrigo Duterte approved the proposed 2021 budget during a special meeting of the Cabinet-level Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) on July 30.
But economic planners cannot yet submit an itemized National Expenditure Program for 2021 because they were still firming up assumptions that had to be revised because 75 percent of the economy was put to a halt by the quarantine imposed on Luzon and other parts of the country from mid-March to May.
The stoppage in economic activities resulted in job losses for more than 7 million Filipinos, while economic production dropped from P19.5 trillion last year and is expected to hit only P19.3 trillion this year, a contraction of 2 to 3.4 percent.
Economic managers have expressed optimism that the country began to recover when quarantine restrictions were eased in June, but planners revisited their macroeconomic assumptions during the DBCC meeting last week.
Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran said on Sunday that the changes to the macroeconomic assumptions were “still under review” as “numbers are difficult to pin down” until the official release of the second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP), or the country’s economic production, on Aug. 6.
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However, Budget Assistant Secretary Rolando Toledo said, also on Sunday, that the DBM would still be able to submit an itemized budget to Congress within the 30-day period mandated by law.
Article continues after this advertisementAfter it is submitted, both houses of Congress will have more than four months to deliberate on the proposal before it is submitted to the President for enactment into law.
Budget Secretary Wendel Avisado earlier said that next year’s budget, equivalent to about a fifth of the country’s projected economic production of P21.5 trillion next year, would prioritize programs and projects addressing the crisis caused by the COVID-19.
Avisado had said the bulk of the 2021 budget would be reprioritized toward saving lives and protecting communities from the deadly virus while making the economy stronger and more agile.
The 2021 budget will also ramp up financial support for the universal health-care program, which Mr. Duterte signed into law last year.
But economic managers from the academe and the private sector had conceded earlier on that GDP likely dropped at a faster pace in the second quarter than the first quarter’s 0.2-percent contraction, the country’s first recession in years.
