Neri to serve as ‘economic whip’

With politics off her back and having vowed to devote the remaining 18 months of her office in improving the economy, President Arroyo announced yesterday that she would designate newly appointed National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) Director General Romulo Neri as the "whip" of her economic team.

The team, composed of Finance Secretary Jose Isidro Camacho, Trade and Industry Secretary Mar Roxas II, Budget Secretary Emilia Boncodin, Agriculture Secretary Luis Lorenzo Jr. and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Rafael Buenaventura, will implement the President’s eight-point program for the first six months of 2003.

The President, herself an economist, has earlier shifted the government’s focus from macroeconomic growth to a more reform-oriented microeconomic thrust, paving the way for the appointment of Neri last Dec. 13 as the new NEDA chief.

Neri, who authored the so-called "7-4-7" economic program which targets a seven percent economic growth for seven consecutive years and is expected to reduce poverty incidence, will principally wield the "baton" in implementing the remaining portion of the Medium-Term Development Plan (MTDP), the President said.

"I said No. 1, what I want to do is work on the economy so we can create more jobs. And No. 2, I want to bring unity," she said.

This was why, she said, she has to renounce her presidential bid for 2004 to end once and for all the divisive atmosphere that detracts the attention of the country’s political leaders instead of supporting her administration’s economic reform bills.

"I’ve been talking about the microeconomic program," she stressed, "and those are in the 7-4-7 plan and then also in the MTDP. But the MTDP is a long, long, long list. Whereas the 7-4-7 has some priorities that in fact, almost coincide point by point with the eight-point program that I’ve been talking about," she explained.

"It’s not the 7-4-7 number," she clarified, "It’s the microeconomic component of that vision. In fact, I’d like the vision of the 7-4-7 because it starts with the soft state, weak state vested interest versus for the people which is exactly the strong republic I’m talking about," the President said.

She laments that the country’s 4.2 percent economic growth was negated by a smaller job growth of 2.8 percent.

This discrepancy, she said, resulted in the so-called "jobless growth" in the country, which fortunately has gone down from four million last year to three million this year.

"And that’s because we need to look at the microeconomic structure of that growth, we need to make sure that composing that growth are those that create jobs."

After 23 months in office, Mrs. Arroyo expressed confidence that her administration can now go into full swing in implementing the microeconomic thrust of the MTDP.

The Chief Executive, however praised former NEDA chief Dante Canlas for doing a great job in pursuing macroeconomic growth and offered him the position as Philippine representative to the Geneva-based World Trade Organization (WTO) to continue pushing for macroeconomic gains that her administration has achieved since assuming office in January 2001. — Marichu Villanueva