Suchergebnisse

Access to finance remains to be a major challenge for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the Philippines despite the implementation by government of several policies and projects to address it. In 2016, MSMEs account for 99.6 percent of the total 911,768 establishments and produced 4.9 million jobs or 63.3 percent of total jobs in the Philippines. Within this sector, 90 percent are micro enterprises—those with assets of up to PHP 3 million; 9.5 percent are small enterprises—those with assets valued from PHP 3,000,001 to PHP 15 million; and 0.4 percent are medium enterprises—those with assets valued from PHP 15,000,001 to PHP 100 million. In other economies in Southeast Asia as well as in the rest of developing Asia, MSMEs also comprise the majority of registered firms, an average of 96 percent in 2015.

A perennial policy challenge facing the Philippines is job generation. Despite the recent trend of economic expansion, the economy has fallen short of creating more and better jobs. For its part, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has crafted its strategic plans to include job generation in line with the economic security pillar. Back in 2002, former Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople had high hopes that the DFA will be an "effective instrument" to help reduce unemployment from 4 million to 1.5 million by 2013. However a decade later 2.8 million Filipinos remained unemployed. That "target" stays unreached by the end of 2016 as 2.4 million Filipinos are still jobless; thus begging the following questions: Why is stable job creation so difficult to achieve? Where does the DFA's economic security strategy figure in the country's development framework? DFA's economic security strategies went through many changes as the Department strove to produce favorable outcomes concerning job creation as well as poverty reduction. In the DFA Strategic Plan 2003-2013, searching new markets for the country's local goods and services and using official development assistance (ODA) were identified as key strategies. These strategies were part of DFA's mandate as the main actor in promoting development diplomacy, which entails designing and harnessing foreign relations in the active pursuit of rapid and sustained long-term growth of the Philippine economy.

On 11 December 2015, the Philippines launched negotiations on its free trade deal with the European Union (EU), some three years after the two parties signed the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA). In addition to being a prerequisite to FTA negotiations, the PCA functions as a general framework of relations between the two sides in the political, security, economic, and development spheres. The agreement, however, is yet to be ratified by the Philippine Senate. The Philippines is eager to forge a more binding agreement with EU, currently the world's biggest trade bloc, for several reasons. The EU granted the Philippines the Generalised Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+) status in 2014, allowing it to export 6,274 eligible products to its market tax-free. A free trade deal with EU gives the Philippines permanent duty-free access to EU's market on top of what GSP+ now offers and creates opportunities to attract bigger EU investments. The Philippines' Department of Trade and Industry believes that a FTA with EU levels the playing field for the Philippines vis-à-vis other ASEAN economies that are also trying to close deals with that bloc. Singapore and Vietnam concluded negotiations with EU in 2014 and 2015, respectively.