The country urgently needs to make up its massive infrastructure backlog. Investment in infrastructure follows the plan detailed in Chapter 5, which prioritizes the creation of integrated and multimodal national transport and logistics system. The system shall connect underserved but otherwise productive areas and communities to markets and social services. Under this system, rural areas, where most of poor reside, shall receive renewed attention. Property-rights issues in agriculture shall be finally resolved signalling a rebirth of interest in agricultural production that will make infrastructure-investments in that sector, such as irrigation, more effective, helping raise farmers' income, improve food security, and enlarge agriculture's contribution to the economy.
Hindered by a record of perennially large budget deficits, government shall generate funds for infrastructure investment through better tax collection and more rational budget allocation - hence the fiscal and budgetary reforms discussed in Chapter 2. Realistically, however, government funds may not suffice, given its need to immediately attend to social development and poverty-alleviation. For this reason, government shall rely on the public-private partnership (PPP) scheme to implement the bulk of its infrastructure program. This scheme encourages the large-sector of private business, including major Filipino conglomerates and large and reputable foreign partners, to participate in financing, construction, and operation of key infrastructure projects. Such a program seeks deliberately to utilize the huge savings and capital resources in the private sector and to provide market-friendly channels for these to support national priorities.
The provision of vital infrastructure and the expansion of logistics chains, combined with a change in the governance regime, is bound to elicit a strong positive response across all classes of entrepreneurs and financiers. Immediately benefited by this will be those industries in which the country already has a demonstrated global advantage but whose expansion is still fettered by certain infrastructure inadequacies, such as power and transport. Included here are the further expansion of ICT-related activities such as business-process outsourcing, (in which the country is now the world's largest employer), different branches of tourism, electronics, sustainable mining, housing and construction, and agribusiness and agroprocessing industries (Chapter 3). This list of industries is only bound to expand as distributional bottlenecks across regions are cleared and the country's inherent advantages finally are revealed. At the same time, government has prepared specific programs to assist micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) at the enterprise-level and to encourage the formation of industry clusters to foster interfirm linkages.