Health, infra projects top priorities in ’16 budget

THE 2016 national budget will be geared toward development projects in the areas of health, infrastructure and social protection, according to Budget Secretary Florencio B. Abad.

Abad told reporters last week that the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), which was leading the drafting of next year’s budget, continued to practice the budget priorities framework, under which the priorities for 2016 would be in the said sectors.

Also, the 2016 budget will continue to focus on 44 priority provinces, as identified in the previous years’ budgets, to support growth in these areas, Abad said.

So far, the DBM has already completed the first part of the two-tiered process in drafting the 2016 national budget, which involved forward estimates.

The second phase, which the DBM will work on this month until next month, would look into the viability of expanding existing programs as well as the initiation of new ones.

“It is about using available fiscal space—what and who gets funded, and to what extent. After that, we can then determine ceilings,” Abad said.

Thus far, the DBM has seen a “substantial increase in the fiscal space,” the Budget chief said, but declined to provide figures.

Abad said the 2016 hard budget ceiling would be determined by the end of May.

For 2015, a national budget of P2.606 trillion was set, 15 percent more than the 2014 budget.

Last December, a P22.4-billion supplemental budget for 2014 was also approved mainly to be spent on reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts in areas flattened by Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) in 2013.