MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines eyes to improve its competitiveness ranking globally to significantly improve to the top 50 countries or become number 2 or 3 among ASEAN countries in the next five years.

"We set a target that we go from 148 ranking in the “Cost of Doing Business” survey conducted by the International Finance Corp. to the top 50 and move up two or three in ASEAN. That is the game plan, we want to be moving up the ladder," said Guillermo Luz, chairman of the National Competitiveness Council (NCC) said.

Luz said the improvement cannot be done overnight but that the improvement should be felt starting 2013 with an initial gains of five to 10 notches from 2012 from the 2011 ranking. Luz said he just assumed post as NCC chairman so he could not be responsible for the country’s competitiveness ranking this year although he admitted that some changes are being implemented already.

Luz said the NCC will benchmark the country’s competitiveness on the four global surveys. These are the Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum, the IFC’s Cost of Doing Business Survey, World Competitiveness Report (similar to WEF), and the Country Brand Index of BBC World News and FutureBrand.

“From the four we know where we rank. In the IFC survey, we are 148 out of 184 countries surveyed,” he said. The WEF, which conducts a survey from April to May is wrapping up its study in three weeks while the IFC is doing the same as it conducts its study between January to May.

"In 2012 we should be ideally in 130s or 120s from 148," Luz said.

"In the beginning, we should be capable of jumping five steps but as you get better we can make a bigger leap because we started with baby steps with 5 to 10 steps then we should be moving aggressively on the first year and aggressively warm up and run," he added.

"Since we were down in the last three years we should be working harder, that is already a wake up call," he said.

Luz said that the strategy is to look where the country scored its worst in each of the surveys.

“We have to look where we are the worst,” Luz said as the NCC is moving to concentrate intervention on addressing competitiveness issues that comprised the lowest 20 percent of the surveys.

Since the country fared poorest on bureaucratic red tape in doing business with the government, Luz said the NCC will focus intervention on the improvement in the processes in government transactions like the issuances of

Improvement in government processes would be addressed via clustering of government agencies that are deemed to be needing the most intervention. They would be assessed on areas that need to be improved and how to improve these areas.

The first cluster of six out of 12 agencies identified would include the Department of Education, Department of Health, Philippine National Police, Bureau of Internal Revenue, Department of Transportation and Communication, and Department of Public Works and Highways. The other cluster would be on infrastructure.

There will be a scorecard for each agency after every assessment which is conducted every six months.

“We have to help those at the bottom because if we raise them up then all moves up. We have to concentrate on the few that really make the difference,” he said

For instance in education, he said, there were several lines in the surveys, but those in the code red in the lowest 20 percent was on quality in science and math education.

By BERNIE CAHILES-MAGKILAT (Manila Bulletin Publishing Corporation)