Big business urges Palace to solve infrastructure, inflation woes

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines is losing as much as P4 trillion annually due to road, sea, and air traffic, the country’s largest business organization said as it  continues to urge the government to address the issues affecting the country’s growth potential.

During the 44th Philippine Business Conference and Expo, the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) submitted to President Duterte its latest set of resolutions which consisted of calls to address infrastructure woes and the rising inflation rate, among others.

“On average, we are losing P3-to 4-billion per year to traffic, airport and seaport congestion,” said the PCCI resolution, which was read by this year’s chairman Ramon Ang.

“If we can solve this, our cost of doing business will improve tremendously. This is what foreign investors are looking for,” the resolution added.

PCCI said traffic alone is costing the country  up to P3.5 billion in losses a day,  or P1.2 trillion a year and is wasting millions of man-hours.

Airport runway congestion, on the other hand, is said to cost the country more than P3 billion a day in added operational expenses and productivity losses, while seaport congestion is also costing billions of pesos daily which has pushed the cost of doing business up.

“There are other transport solutions that should be implemented. We propose more elevated highways and other mass transit systems,” the group said.

“We must build a new international airport with four parallel runways within an hour’s drive of major cities within Metro Manila, and connected by mass transit and major toll roads spanning north to south and east to west. We need to build major seaports outside Metro Manila,” it added.

PCCI also noted that the peso is weakening because of factors at home and abroad, while inflation is increasing due to high oil prices.

The business group suggested that the country should import less luxury goods which are unnecessary, while at the same time, strengthen the export sector.

“We urge the government to rethink any moves that will make our exporters less competitive,” PCCI said.

Meanwhile, the group said it is happy that the government is rethinking the next round of fuel tax increases in 2019.

“We are also happy that the government is aggressively addressing the rice shortage that has impacted the affordability of Filipino’s staple food,” it said.