PH to roll out red carpet for Asia’s financial movers

Manila—The Philippines will roll out the red carpet to the movers and shakers of the international financial community today as host of the 45th annual meetings of the Asian Development Bank, an event unseen here in last decade but taking place now that the country has become one of the hottest emerging markets in the region.

Within the next four days, more than 4,300 political leaders, finance officials and development experts will discuss pressing issues confronting the Asia-Pacific region, which has seen steady growth and is leading global recovery, yet remains vulnerable to growing inflation, spikes in fuel prices, austerity measures in the eurozone and worsening impacts of climate change.

The private sector, which has teamed up with government economic managers in an effort to prove to the world that it’s “more fun” to hold the meetings here, is excited that the ADB has rediscovered the Philippines for its annual meetings. Business leaders are optimistic that this event will create a bigger international buzz in support of the government’s infrastructure-building, governance agenda as well as campaigns to boost foreign investments and tourism.

Philippine Stock Exchange chair Jose Pardo said yesterday it was “impeccable timing” to hold the meetings in the country at this point. “While ADB meetings have long been planned, it comes at a time when our stock market continues its bull run. This provides us the opportunity to showcase the country as an emerging investment destination,” added Pardo, a former finance and trade secretary.

“The upcoming ADB event will spotlight the Philippines as a bright spot for investment opportunities and will also highlight the good credit ratings of the country,” said Teresita Sy-Coson, who chairs the country’s largest bank, Banco de Oro Unibank, and is and vice chair of SM Investments Corp., which owns the SMX Convention Center where some host country activities and seminars under the Philippine Corporate and Investment Pavilion will be held.

Former Prime Minister Cesar Virata, who has played a key role in hosting ADB meetings five to six times as a technocrat during the Marcos regime, said this event would be good for attracting tourists and foreign investments.

“They (investors) can see what we need and also they can see the activities of our private sector and so because they are going to be our partners and counter-parties, that’s the advantage of having the international meetings here. We built PICC (Philippine International Convention Center) for international meetings,” Virata said in an interview yesterday.

“So it’s nothing new to us except that it hasn’t been done here in a long time,” he said. Since then, Virata said the membership of the ADB has increased and so has the expected attendees. In the past, he said, a number of Indochina countries were not represented because there were ongoing internal wars.

The last time the Philippines hosted a full-scale ADB annual meeting was in 1999. A small-scale meeting was held in 2003 when the meetings had to be relocated due to political turbulence in the original host country.

Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima, who was among the busiest with the preparations for the annual meetings in the last few months or so, has described this event as a “coming out opportunity for the Aquino administration to showcase the dividends of good governance.”

Half of the participants are foreign VIPs, including the heads of the Inter-American Development Bank, Japan International Cooperation Agency, the Association of Southeast Asian Nation (Asean), the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation.

/INQUIRER