Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Benjamin Diokno said Friday the country remained resilient in 2021 despite the prolonged global health crisis as he urged everyone to be vigilant so that the gains from the COVID-19 battle will not go to waste.
Diokno said in a yearend message titled “The Past, The Present and The Future” the world made substantial progress in battling the COVID-19 pandemic and the global economic forecast turned positive.
“In the Philippines, we saw solid recovery indicators. The economy expanded by 12.0 percent in the second quarter, ending the pandemic-driven recession. This was followed by 7.1-percent growth in the third quarter, prompting government to raise its growth assumption for the year to 5.0 percent to 5.5 percent,” he said.
Diokno also cited the restoration of jobs, the decline in unemployment rate to 7.4 percent in October from the peak of 17.6 percent in April 2020, the rebound in manufacturing and the recovery in trade from last year’s contraction, as global demand increased and as local manufacturers anticipated rising consumption.
“The Philippines has gotten better at containing the virus, although we must all remain vigilant as new variants are discovered. The government’s virus-containment strategy has shifted from wide-area to more targeted granular lockdowns,” he said.
Looking forward to 2022 and beyond, he said the BSP was working incessantly toward a better-than-ever Philippine economy.
“The goal is not to simply regain what was lost. Besides robust growth, we are gearing up for a post-COVID economy that is more technologically advanced, more inclusive, and more sustainable than ever before,” he said.
He said BSP helped cushion the blow of the pandemic on the economy. The BSP reduced the policy rate to a historic low of 2 percent and infused over P2.3 trillion in liquidity to the economy, he said.
“We will ensure that monetary policy remains in sync with other initiatives to hasten our economic recovery,” Diokno said.
He said digitalization also helped the Filipino people adapt to challenging times. Under the Digital Payments Transformation Roadmap, the
BSP aims for half of financial transactions in the country to go digital by 2023. Faster processing of payments speeds up capital turnaround and income growth, he said.
Amid BSP’s enabling regulations and active engagement with industry players, the Philippines is poised to hit the 50-percent target in two years. The share of digital payments to total financial transactions rose to 20.1 percent in 2020.
“We expect further increases in 2021 amid the establishment of digital banks, expanded use of QR codes, and traditional banks’ enhancement of digital services, among other developments… This is consistent with our goal of shifting from a cash-heavy to a cash-lite economy,” Diokno said.
“We shouldn’t let the COVID-19 crisis go to waste: we should learn from it. We will rebound and build back better—toward a more technologically advanced, more inclusive, and more sustainable economy for all Filipinos,” Diokno said.