Challenge Of Making Cities Liveable In East Asia, The by Lye Liang Fook Wong John

Author:Lye, Liang Fook,Wong, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
Published: 2016-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Possible roles of regional cooperation among ASEAN plus three countries

Given the pattern of urbanisation in the Philippines and the constraints that the country faces in harnessing urban development in order to promote economic growth and higher standard of living, it appears that exchange of best practices and financing opportunities are possible areas for ASEAN Plus Three regional cooperation. Sharing of best practices and financing efforts would be crucial in addressing the emerging physical infrastructure issues in Philippine urban areas. The Philippines also needs to have solid information on alternatives to its current institutional set-up, including incentives designed for planning and implementing government units, and must be able to elicit discussions about best country practices through regional cooperation.

Urbanisation is a major driver of infrastructure investments. Strategic infrastructure investments can also steer the direction of urbanisation, specifically the extent of urban sprawl and the subsequent demand for basic services. The Philippines needs to assess the consequences of urban sprawl and further motorisation, which in turn leads to higher energy consumption and pollution. The knowledge of different country experiences on motorisation and mass transit (e.g. rail or bus rapid transit systems) as an alternative option will be very useful for the Philippines.

The rise in urbanisation requires strategic investments in mass transport, highways, bridges, ports, airports, water distribution networks, electric power systems, and telecommunications and information infrastructure. The Philippines is targeting to spend 5% of GDP annually in these infrastructure sectors but so far it is nowhere near this target as public infrastructure spending as a share of GDP ran ged between a low of 1.40% to a high of 2.09% in the 2008–2012 period.19

The major constraint to meeting the target in previous years was resource availability. However, today, the Philippines has wider fiscal space, therefore more public resources are being made available for infrastructure investments. The more serious short-term constraints presently are the weak capacity of government agencies to absorb more funds and implement projects. Regional cooperation such as sharing of best practices and innovations in procurement, contractual arrangements, project management and project implementation may help to address and solve the short-term problem on absorptive capacity of government agencies. Partnerships in dynamic capacity-building for government personnel and managers could also be considered. In the longer term, regional cooperation could involve mobilising financial resources to achieve and sustain the target infrastructure investment-GDP ratio.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.