NCC eyes scoring system for policy recommendations

MANILA, Philippines - The National Competitiveness Council (NCC) plans to come out with a new rating system next year that will measure which among policy recommendations in the country are worth pursuing or not.

NCC co-chairman Guillermo Luz said the country’s public-private task force on competitiveness is currently working with an undisclosed group to develop a scoring system for policy ideas and recommendations.

“We have found this practice of using a scoring system very effective. When we put the metrics together it allows us to spot what we need to fix and whether we are moving in the right direction or not,” Luz said.

“Let’s say you got a policy idea. The idea is to analyze that policy so we can set scoring criteria and we can score the policy reform or the proposal. If you are in a policy reform area, clearly one of the things in our minds and the business community and many people is what benefits we want to get out of a policy reform,” he added.

By establishing a policy economic impact score, Luz said the country could determine which ones deserve to be pushed.

“If it scores high, then we should be able to push it harder than a policy idea which scores low. The idea is if we could have a scoring system and tie that score to a job generation criteria or a social benefit criteria that we designed, it’s going to be easier to make decisions,” Luz said.

“Once we determine that priority then anything that does not fit into that priority, we should automatically begin to repeal because we have too many laws anyway,” he added.

Since it started in 2011, the NCC has been pushing to move the country from the bottom third of the world rankings into the top third.

It tracks 12 global competitiveness indices to check the performance of the Philippines.

According to the NCC, the Philippines has already attained its target position on two of the indices—the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index and the Gender Gap Report.

“However, while we have moved up into the middle ranks within Asean, we remain quite a distance from our goal of being in the top third globally by the end of 2016,” the NCC said.

Luz said the proposed policy score concept is expected to help further boost the country’s competitiveness globally.