Top exec seeks benchmarking of industries

Businessman George T. Siy has come up with a three-point agenda for the next administration to address: Benchmarking of industries, creation of jobs and a paradigm shift in the economy.

Siy, president of the Confederation of Garment Exporters of the Philippines (Congep) said that benchmarking allows the country to really know how it is faring with the rest of the world.

"The next administration should use benchmark data for everything so we can all monitor progress," he said. "We need to stop producing studies and talking," he added.

"Benchmarking needs to be done in industrial and labor productivity, in agriculture as well as in pension services, in movies as well as judicial system output, in education achievement levels and in the efficiency of our resource allocation. It is very important to control the costing of infrastructure projects by benchmarking to acceptable levels, to make sure there are no way off costs," Siy said.

The country’s performance should not be compared versus the past year, nor the past few years, but versus our neighbors. A 4.5 percent growth for the Philippines in a period would be good if our neighbors like Thailand were not consistently doing seven percent and China cities were not trying to slow down their growth to eight percent.

On the matter of job creation, the Wharton-trained Siy said the next administration would do well to prepare for the possible loss of jobs by next year when the garments quota is lifted.

"Any new administration must deal with a medium term problem of not only generating jobs to absorb these jobs lost, but also the new working age population coming on stream," Siy said, adding that smaller garment firms are expected to fall by the wayside with the removal of quotas in 2005.

The next administration will come face to face with this problem, especially if inflation and lending rates kick up, or there is a systematic financial hiccup. The framework for addressing this possibility must be started now, Siy said.

The 2003 US embargo on some garment export categories which was imposed should not be allowed to happen again. Industry and government should continue to work together, but this will be effective only if the data is accurate, reconcilable with the US numbers, closely monitored, and given sufficient priority.

"If we cannot convince international buyers that we can properly keep track of shipments, how can we convince the business community that we can do more complicated things?" Siy asked.

He also said that the Filipino business and government should change the mindset that if the facility is not in the country, that enterprise is not a Filipino enterprise. "We should encourage and support the internationalization of the Filipino business’ mindset, network, skill set, and competitiveness level," he said.

The government can ill afford to let industry and manufacturing disappear entirely from the Philippines. While there are other business sectors to enter , industrial produce is important because an economy needs balance in capabilities , and we cannot be a purely trading economy since we are not very efficient even in that. Also we cannot keep depending on our overseas workforce to bring in the balancing income factor in our economy, especially as we are not upgrading this," Siy said.