Gov’t to adopt national industrial strategy

The government is preparing to roll out a Comprehensive National Industrial Strategy and revive the Industry Development Council (IDC) by the end of the year to boost the manufacturing sector’s contribution to economic expansion, Trade Undersecretary Adrian Cristobal Jr. told reporters.

Growing job-generating industries is the main goal of the National Industrial Strategy, with specific focus on manufacturing, services and agriculture.

“For the industrial strategy, the challenging part is it would involve services and agriculture,” Cristobal said.

As for manufacturing, he said, it already made up about 25 percent of the economy but the Department of Trade and Industry and its affiliated agency, the Board of Investments (BOI), wanted to further expand the sector.

In the meantime, the IDC was created as an agency in charge of industrial policymaking, policy coordination and implementation in the 1990s. The council is composed of industry representatives and key officials of agencies like the National Economic and Development Authority, the Department of Finance and the Department of Agriculture with the DTI as chair.

“It (IDC) stopped convening more than a decade ago. We need to revive that. We are preparing the orders for that,” Cristobal said.

Industry observers, however, noted that the IDC in the 1990s had been unable to stem market failures such as anti-competitive policies in some sectors.

Philippine industries, he said, would grow with better coordination and less duplication among government agencies.

According to the BOI, the manufacturing sector grew by 20.4 percent in the first quarter of 2013 and has drawn in P3.4 billion worth of investments.

The agency stressed that the manufacturing sector would be generating meaningful jobs and promoting sustainable and inclusive growth which were needed to prepare the country for the Asean economic integration come 2015.