Government budget and the Sustainable Development Goals: the Philippine experience

The Philippine planning and budgeting systems are well placed in terms of their capacity to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and could serve as a useful reference for other countries. First, all the SDGs can be mapped into the priorities of the Philippines Development Plan (PDP). Greater congruence between the SDG indicators, on the one hand, and the PDP Results Matrices indicators, on the other, improves the integration of SDG implementation and PDP implementation. Second, the considerably improved and fairly strong emphasis on results and performance of the existing government budgeting system provides a solid foundation for linking the annual budget with the PDP and the SDGs so that limited resources are allocated and spent on programmes that achieve the desired societal goals and outcomes. Given the breadth and scope of the SDGs, however, this study supports incipient efforts to put in place an SDG expenditure tagging exercise to assist policy makers in evaluating the effectiveness of the SDG-related programmes of various government agencies and in prioritizing its limited resources. At the same time, it recommends that current efforts towards SDG localization be intensified given that recent Supreme Court ruling on the Mandanas-Garcia IRA petitions which will effectively increase the share of local governments in national taxes.