The Philippine Economic Zone Authority, one of the government’s investment promotion agencies, said it expects investment approvals to increase 10 percent in 2018 to P261.33 billion from P237.57 billion in 2017.
Peza director-general Charito Plaza said the agency had a good performance last year, despite a slight reduction in the number of projects to 554 from 576 in 2016 and the negative impact on business process outsourcing expansion of US President Donald Trump’s policy on offshore American businesses.
“But again because of the launching of the Philippine economic zones map and the major marketing roadshow that we will have starting next year and the global ecozones convergence conference, we hope to put the Philippines in the world map as an interesting investment haven so we hope to gather more investors,” Plaza said.
Investments in 2017 went up 8.9 percent from P218.174 billion in 2016. The highest investments came form economic zone developments which comprised about 67 percent of total investments.
Exports from the economic zones are expected to expand 8 percent this year while employment is anticipated to rise 5 percent in 2018.
Full-year data for exports and employment are still being collated. Data showed that as of October 2017, exports from ecozones grew 8.9 percent to $42.39 billion, while jobs increased 5.8 percent to 1,397,040 heads.
Plaza said the breakdown of investments per sector and per industry would be announced in January 2018 while final exports and employment data would be released by February.
Peza expects a resurgence in investments from the BPO sector in 2018. “We hope to rebound from a slowdown in investments from BPOs in 2018 and an expansion from other industries as well,” Plaza said.
Investments from BPOs went down 49 percent to P15.56 billion in 2017 from P30.44 billion in 2016.
Peza said it was still determining if the decline in BPO investments was due to Trump’s previous announcement on recouping or pooling together all offshore American businesses back to US shores.
“But we’re trying to read between the lines. Our embassy in Washington said the announcement pertained to manufacturing businesses only,” Plaza said.
Peza is also looking at the impact on ecozone investments of the second part of the tax reform program pertaining to income tax holidays.