Business leaders highlight need for stable policies to spur growth

MANILA, Philippines — Top business leaders have cited the need for stable policies to ensure economic growth in 2025 and beyond.

During a panel discussion at the Pilipinas Conference 2024 organized by the Stratbase Group, Ayala Corp. chairman Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala highlighted the importance of upholding the sanctity of contracts and ensuring long term policy stability to encourage more investments in the country.

“I have always been a great believer that private capital should be used extensively to address some of the public sector pain points in the country.

For that, you need an environment that is friendly to that type of collaboration between the public and private sector,” Zobel said.

“For that, the contracts have to remain sacred. And one must be consistent in the framework that is accepted by the government. And if that is given some stability over long periods of time, then you’ll see a lot of private capital in some of the bigger areas of the country,“ he added.

Prime Infra president and CEO Guillaume Lucci said the primary challenge in infrastructure development is the implementation of policies in the local level.

“I don’t think national policies are really the problem, frankly. I think what happens often is there’s a little bit of a disconnect between sophisticated quality national policies and how they get implemented at the local level,” Lucci said.

“If there is one area of bottleneck, I would say that is the implementation of those policies at the LGU level,” he added.

Meanwhile, ACCIONA Infrastructure CEO Jose Diaz-Caneja said there is a need to ensure that policies and projects apply in the long term, not just in one administration.