Executive
Forum 2001
Montreux, Switzerland
26-29 September 2001
Interviews
Philippines:
Export promotion as a collective effort
Jose
Antonia S. Buencamino, Assistant Secretary, Department of Trade
and Industry, Philippines
Question: The Philippines is unique among larger countries in
setting up its structure of trade promotion – you don’t have
a single trade promotion organization but co-ordination among a
number of trade promotion offices. How has that worked out –
what are the benefits, what are the disadvantages?
Buencamino : There are
certain advantages. You get cross-cutting issues more easily
networked, and everyone can check on what the other is doing. At
the same time, though, the disadvantage is that sometimes you
find out too late that there is duplication. Resources are, of
course, utilized less optimally because each agency, and in our
case the co-ordination work is across nine agencies, has its own
management information system and personnel .There are nine
overheads instead of just one. But through time our trade
promotion efforts have evolved in this way and as we learned in
this Forum, one size cannot fit all, and in our case we found it
easier to work this way, with nine agencies some of them
specializing in a certain product such as garments or coffee but
generally it is a common, collective effort and actually
co-ordination work is going quite well. The International Trade
Group (ITG) of my department meets at management level every
Tuesday. That’s one way of filtering information and cascading
instructions. Unless we find a better way of operating, I think
we’ll keep the set-up.
Is this an outcome of the historic way in which the
Philippines trade promotion organizations have operated?
Buencamino: Historically, the so-called TPO started out
as a single bureau, a very big bureau. But it was so big that in
our experience it was perhaps better to spin off what later
became the Design Centre, the Trade Exhibition missions and so
forth. At the same time, this big bureau of export trade
promotion, known long ago as the Bureau of Foreign Trade, spun
off agencies which in their own right became huge undertakings.
But co-ordination and collaboration with the private sector was
maintained throughout. My colleague in Montreux, Mr Segio
Ortez-Luiz, is the president of the Philippines Exporters
Confederation (PHILEXPORT). It’s the largest entity dealing
with trade. We deal with them almost every other day. There won’t
be a week when I won’t see Mr Ortez-Luiz. The co-ordination
with PHILEXPORT in particular has been quite intensive. The
co-ordination with other industries through the Philippine
Chamber of Commerce is also there. We also deal with the
Federation of Philippine Industries. There are many of these
groups. They have different objectives and it is better to have
separate associations dealing with separate objectives. We have
very intensive collaboration and co-ordination with the private
sector.
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