The economy is expected to regain up to P30 billion in trade and business opportunities with the recent transition of the so-called “NCR Plus” bubble to the general community quarantine, Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said Thursday.
Lopez said in an interview the economy was slowly getting better as more companies and businesses reopened, providing support to the economy and opening jobs to hundreds of thousands of Filipino workers.
“The NEDA [National Economic and Development Authority] has its computations that about P60 billion was lost during the ECQ [enhanced community quarantine]. That further went down to about P30 billion when restrictions eased to MECQ [modified enhanced community quarantine]. Now that we are in the GCQ, we expect to regain anywhere between P2 [billion] and P30 billion or somewhere in the middle,” he said.
Lopez said with the shift to “GCQ with heightened restrictions,” the number of non-operational businesses was expected to decline to a range of 8 percent to 9 percent from 12 percent under the MECQ and 15 percent under the ECQ.
Data showed that at the height of pandemic in 2020, about 40 percent of businesses were closed.
Lopez said that as the country moved to better quarantine levels, employment would continue to improve and accommodate the remaining 400,000 to 500,000 workers from 1.5 million workers who lost their sources of income when the ECQ was reinstated.
The department noted that with the reopening of the economy, businesses were strictly adhering with the minimum health protocols.
“We are monitoring all the businesses especially the newly-opened industries and those allowed with increased capacities. And there are also other agencies monitoring the business sector, with us,” Lopez said.
He said the inclusion of the A4 category in vaccine roll-out would also help encourage more workers to go out and look for employment and provide the necessary push for business owners to be more confident in restarting operations.
Lopez said, however, the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases continued to have reservations on the proposal to grant senior citizens the so-called vaccine passports that would give them the freedom to go out of their homes.
“We want to encourage the public to have themselves vaccinated as early as possible. Let us not wait for our preferred vaccines. When it’s our time to be vaccinated, let’s be cordial enough to accept what is available. It is better to have any vaccine than nothing at all,” he said.