More sweeping second wave of structural reforms may be expected in the next three years, powered and backstopped by legislations in both houses of Congress where the administration claims a supermajority.
Albay Rep. Joey Sarte Salceda, the Lower House’s resident economist, said many reform initiatives would be focused on “investments making the Philippines more globally competitive.”
Salceda said the expected reforms, primarily in three tracks—economic, political and social—will become a third pillar of the ‘Dutertenomics,' an economic strategy aimed to attain “a rapid expansion of state capacity both financial and political to thrust the economy on a higher growth trajectory.”
‘Dutertenomics,’ which Salceda coined, aims to “create mass middle class and lift five million families over the poverty hurdle… partly to catch up with the (country’s) fast-growing regional peers, but more to break the social dysfunction and increase people’s confidence in the government and the system.”