PCCI lists top 10 business concerns

By Richmond Mercurio (The Philippine Star), October 14, 2016

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) submitted yesterday a list of its proposed resolutions to the current administration.

The list’s top 10, which the country’s largest business organization compiled during the 42nd Philippine Business Conference, included resolutions for ease of doing business, taxation, information and communications technology (ICT), transportation, energy and power, agriculture, industry, tourism, education and SME financing.

For ICT, the PCCI urged the Senate and the House of Representatives to amend Republic Act 7295 to create open access in telecommunications.

“Open access is the separation of the physical infrastructure from service provisioning. This means identifying the various segments in the infrastructure and opening them up to more and different players without requiring a Congressional franchise,” the resolution read.

In transportation, the group called on the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Department of Transportation (DOTr) to transfer the accreditation and supervision of international cargo forwarding and logistics from the Philippine Shippers Bureau to Marina of DOTr.

For urging tourism, the government is urged to make a definitive decision on opening other major international airports in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao within the next six years to decongest air traffic at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.

Doing so would also prepare the country to receive 20 million foreign tourists in the medium term, and leapfrog to be one of the top five tourist destinations in the ASEAN by 2025, the PCCI said.

The business group expressed its support to the comprehensive tax reform initiatives of the Department of Finance, as well as the government’s program of harmonizing the policies and procedures and reducing the number of days to process permits and licenses to a maximum of three days across all national and local government agencies and local government units.

In terms of power and energy, the PCCI backed government efforts to focus strategically on achieving sustainable and reliable power supply at a competitive cost, directly in support of the specific economic and industrialization thrust of the new administration.

Allowing the use of government funds for MSME lending as well as increasing the DTI’s budget were also part of the group’s resolutions this year.