A research group urged the government to allocate more funds for the local coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) response and to focus less on the country’s sovereign credit rating.
Ibon Foundation, a non-profit socioeconomic research group, said the stimulus budget allotted for the pandemic was inadequate, pointing out that the country had spent the least amount for Covid-19 response among major economies in Southeast Asia.
“The magnitude of the country’s response has to be commensurate to the crisis at hand,” the foundation said in a statement.
The group cited the International Monetary Fund (IMF) report that said the Philippines’ fiscal policy response was equivalent to 3.1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
This was less than the Covid-19 stimulus of Singapore (19.7 percent), Vietnam (13.3 percent), Thailand (9.6 percent), Indonesia (4.4 percent), and Malaysia (4.3 percent), Ibon said.
The foundation also noted that the Philippine figure was half the global average of 6.2 percent.
Ibon said the proposed P140-billion fund in the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act, or Bayanihan 2, would bring the country’s fiscal policy response to just 3.8 percent of GDP.
The foundation said the House of Representatives and the Senate were eyeing stimulus measures worth P1.3 trillion but were stopped by the finance department.
The group attributed the Philippines’s smaller Covid-19 stimulus budget to the “narrow-minded obsession with ‘creditworthiness’” of officials.
“The obsession of the economic managers with ‘creditworthiness’ is misplaced. Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia have lower credit ratings than the Philippines but are spending more to respond to and recover from the pandemic,” Ibon said. Carlito P. Topacio