Government spending speeds up in January

MANILA, Philippines — Disbursements to government agencies picked up in the first month of the year fueled by increased spending on infrastructure and personnel services, the Department of Budget reported on Wednesday.

Public spending jumped 15.5 percent year-on-year in January to P228.7 billion, Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno told a press conference.

Diokno said the higher disbursement growth rate for the month was driven by infrastructure spending, which grew 25.2 percent to P43.3 billion.

Despite the improvement, Diokno said he is not happy with the pace of infrastructure rollout thus far, adding that the government needs to catch up by addressing “the right of way problem” and identifying the right contractors.

Meanwhile, personnel services spending stood at P61.9 billion, ramping up by 22.4 percent on the back of higher base pay for the military and implementation of salary adjustments for civilian government employees.

The budget chief also said as of end-March, the government has released P3.165 trillion out of P3.767 trillion national budget, or 84 percent of the total. During the comparable period last year, 79.9 percent of the P3.35 trillion budget was released.

Citing the Bureau of Treasury’s latest cash operations report, Diokno added that government spending amounted to P240.3 billion in the month of February. This an “impressive” 37 percent year-on-year increase, he said.

“All of these show that the fiscal program of the national government is on track backed by the strong performance of both government spending and revenue collections,” Diokno told reporters.

“We are optimistic that we will cut down underspending even further from 2.4 percent last year,” he added.

The Duterte administration has set an P8.44-trillion infrastructure spending plan until 2022 to spur gross domestic product growth to 7-8 percent.

For 2018, the government projects revenues to hit P2.788 trillion and expenditures to reach P3.313 trillion, putting the full-year budget deficit goal at P523.7 billion.

From January to February 2018, deficit was at P52 billion, up by 140 percent.