âBuild, Build, Buildâ enters legacy-building stage
May 11, 2021 | 12:04 am
Reporter
HEADING into its final year in office, the government will have tweaked the âBuild, Build, Buildâ (BBB) program multiple times to favor those projects with the best chance of being even partially completed before President Rodrigo R. Duterte steps down.
Starting with 75 big-ticket projects at its launch in 2017, the P8.4-trillion flagship infrastructure program was meant to address the Philippinesâ lack of competitiveness because of bad roads, transportation, and crippling road traffic that made Metro Manila a difficult place to live for its residents, much less investors.
But the project list was subjected to three revisions in four years, entailing several rounds of feasibility reassessment. The result was that some projects were omitted and other more âshovel-readyâ projects added to the list, ultimately expanding it to over 104. The National Economic and De
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February 1, 2021 | 7:43 pm Font Size
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ECONOMIC PLANNERS will make their pitch to Congress on the urgency of passing economic reform bills before the legislature turns its attention to preparing for next year’s national elections, the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) said Monday.
“A few more months before the campaign season, we will work to get the rest of the bills passed. We will present to the Congress the urgency of having economic bills passed because these were packaged,” Acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick T. Chua said in a televised briefing.
Mr. Chua said the amendments to the Public Service Act, Retail Trade Liberalization Act, and the Foreign Investment Act, which are all pending at the Senate, should be passed this year as these are “crucial in revving up the Philippine economy” and sustaining its recovery from the pandemic.
Reporter
THE PHILIPPINES slipped two spots in a global corruption index released on Thursday by Transparency International, which noted widespread corruption has weakened many countries’ response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
In the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2020, the Philippines was tied with Moldova at 115
th place out of 180 countries or territories.
The Philippines retained its score of 34 out of 100 in a scale that measures perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople. The scale indicates 100 as “very clean” and 0 as “highly corrupt.”
“Efforts to control corruption in the Philippines appear mostly stagnant since 2012,” Transparency International said.