Winning investors' confidence.

One factor that keeps me hopeful about the Philippine economic growth prospects is the strong interest shown by foreign and local companies in investing in the country, either for expansion projects or new facilities.

New investments, in particular, have multiplier effects on the economy as they involve the opening of factories that also benefit the property sector. A new project will generate jobs in the construction, real estate, transportation and logistics, services and eventually manufacturing industries.

This will also require training and facilitate technology or knowledge transfer to upgrade the skills of the Filipino talents. The more factories or facilities we have, the more cost-competitive our domestic industries will become, resulting in a stronger value chain that will lure more investments.

Other Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Indonesia have developed their automotive sectors by opening their markets to Japanese car assemblers. One company came after another, leading to the further improvement of infrastructure and logistics systems that made the two nations ideal as manufacturing sites.

The same concept is behind the development of economic and industrial zones in the Philippines, where locators do not have to invest in their own infrastructure because the system is already in place after the government built it for them.

The Philippines has its own share of success in developing the information technology and business process management sector (IT-BPM), which now contributes over $30 billion in service exports annually. If we could replicate the growth of IT-BPM in the manufacturing sector, we can certainly achieve a faster economic growth.

This is why I believe that the multi-billion investments reported by the government's main investment promotion agencies will help sustain our high-growth trajectory in the coming years. Manufacturing and agriculture could help us achieve a gross domestic product growth of 7 percent to 8 percent annually over the next five years.

While actual foreign direct investments (FDIs) reported by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) slightly eased to $4.7 billion in the first seven months of 2023 from $5.5 billion in the same period last year, the more forward-looking investment pledges approved by the Board of Investments (BOI) and Philippine Economic Zone Authority are more encouraging.

The figures cited by the BOI and PEZA bode well for the next five years of the Marcos...