Gov’t targeting petro dollars to increase local investments

By Ayen Infante

06/11/2008

After the collapse of the National Broadband deal with China that has also affected other Chinese investments in the country, the government is now looking at tapping petro dollars from Arabian countries to boost local investments for mining, tourism and infrastructure.

Board of Investments (BoI) managing head and Trade and Industry undersecretary Elmer Hernandez told reporters that he has instructed the BoI’s investment promotions group to give priority to exploring investment prospects in the Middle East.

“We want to pursue a plan to capture most of these petro dollars coming from the Middle East,” Hernandez said.

The Middle East has been aggressive in investing outside of their countries particularly in the areas of infrastructure, tourism and mining.

Aside from the Middle East, the Philippines is also shifting its attention to Europe. “We look at Europe inn a different manner, we want to find out what is their particular interest in Asia,” he added.

Based on studies, Europe is starting to go East and its becoming active in the region in the next five years, he said.

The entire region is now challenged on how to become effective in pursuing Europe but how the Philippines could capture much of that interest, is another challenge that we (BoI) is now studying.

Europe is spending to invest in other countries in the region particularly in the areas of IT-enabled services, business process outsourcing, telecommunications and now, in manufacturing.

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