Politicians: Curse of Doing Business

One of the initiatives of Pres Noynoy Aquino is to drive out corruption and reduce costs in doing business in the Philippines. If starting business in the Philippines is a burden in itself, it will discourage investors.

More than ever before, we need more investors, we need more inflows of foreign capital into our market. As the size of our national economy has been overtaken by Southeast Asian neighbors, the Philippines has to attract more capitalists now or perish.

Based on a worldwide index, the Philippines placed at the bottom in terms of doing business here. This is largely due to the bureaucratic maze that an investor has to go through before he could start his venture. He also has to deal with local officials who want to make money out of new businesses.

I believe that if Noynoy is serious enough in driving out corruption and reducing cost of doing business in the country, he must also address the problem of political persecution and institutionalized corruption in the local government units.

While the national government is poised to welcome foreign investors and make it easy for them to start a business here, local officials are doing the very opposite: they are making it hard for small and big businessmen to start a business in the Philippines.

I remember of a story wherein an owner of hotel-chain business wanted to build a resort-hotel in a town in Bohol. As a gesture of respect, he paid a courtesy call to the mayor of that town and let the official know of his interest to start a hotel-resort.

The businessman immediately abandoned the plan because instead of getting encouragement and support from the mayor, the mayor wasted no time in extracting money from a businessman who could have brought income to his town and provided jobs to people.

The problem of doing business in the country has its roots in local government unit. Officials want to have a part of a business they are not supposed to get involve with. So long as the business is legal and not destructive to the environment, then it should be given a permit without many questions.

Getting a business license has become a torturous experience for many entrepreneurs. There are so many vultures in government offices.

If only we remove the authorities of mayors and barangay captains in granting permits or licenses, the world would become a better place to live in, businesses would sprout everywhere, and economic activities would bloom, to the benefit of the general public and the entire country.

Local autonomy has its own curse to the business community. It is working against economic development. Ask any business owner, everyone would agree that it is such a pain in the ass to deal with local officials even if you just want to start a sari-sari store.

Businesses provide jobs to people, and when people have jobs, they'd have a purchasing power. The reason we are not seeing many businesses in the towns and in the provinces is because there are too many corrupt officials that you have to deal with.

If only we deal with one official and one licensing agency, we can be sure that it is easy to attain economic progress nationwide.

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Atty. Alexander Lim, TBS