MANILA – The efforts of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) and the Department of Transportation (DOTr) to meet their spending program despite the budget delay are big contributors to achieving the six percent to seven percent growth target this year, said Finance secretary Carlos Dominguez III in an interview after the Economic Development Cluster (EDC) meeting at the Department of Finance (DOF) office in Manila on Thursday.
“I’ve always maintained that we’ll most likely hit the lower end of our six to seven percent target and it looks like our continuous monitoring of projects and removal of the bottlenecks is paying off,” he said.
“And I think, especially the two big infrastructure departments are doing their utmost and quite achieving a good percentage of their target,” he added.
Growth, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), in the first half of this year averaged at 5.5 percent, lower than the full-year goal of six percent to seven percent.
It slipped to 5.6 percent in the first quarter from 6.3 percent in the last quarter of 2018 due to the impact of the delay in the approval of this year’s national budget.
Growth in the second quarter further slowed to 5.5 percent.
However, a recovery was posted in the third quarter when gross domestic product rose by 6.2 percent due mainly to the catch-up program for infrastructure projects, with both the DPWH and the DOTr tasked to hasten the implementation of their respective projects.
Transportation secretary Arthur Tugade is confident of meeting its disbursement target even as the agency has disbursed only 57 percent or P46.82 billion of its budget as of Nov. 28.
“DOTr expects to disburse an additional P30.85 billion on the last month of the year to fulfill 94 percent its commitment of P82.39 billion for 2019,” Dominguez said.
Other contributors to the catch-up spending program are the infrastructure projects of the Department of Education and the Department of Social Welfare and Development, among others.
Dominguez said the government is also hastening the implementation of the conditional cash transfer program to the about 3.88 million beneficiaries, which is about 93.21 percent of 4.16 million target beneficiaries.
“Overall, we remain on track to reach our GDP growth target of six to seven percent in 2019,” he added.(PNA)
