FOLLOWING the three-quarter slump due to the flood control mess, Philippine public infrastructure and construction may now see a 20-percent growth in the second half of 2026. And, according to an official of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), this is expected to largely contribute to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) toward the end of the year.
At a forum on Monday, DBM Assistant Secretary Romeo Matthew T. Balanquit said the Budget and Management agency is now going ‘full throttle’ as it has put in place all the necessary mechanisms to prevent another infrastructure project scandal from happening.
‘For the past three quarters, public construction was down by at least 30 percent and that cost our GDP a lot, that’s why you see the slowdown,’ Balanquit said during the World Bank’s Launch of the Philippines Public Finance Review and National Policy Dialogue on Public Finance Reform on Monday in Mandaluyong City.
Balanquit said, however, that he’s hopeful that the Philippine economy will be ‘seeing something like a 20-percent increase in public construction’ for the second half of the year.
This, he said, ‘would be a big contribution to our GDP going towards the end of this year.’
The DBM official, however, stressed anew the importance of restoring the ‘state of public trust-the business and consumer confidence’ as this has suffered in the past three quarters, particularly in the area of public construction, after the flood control corruption scandal leaked.
‘There’s that importance of planning again. We go back to our planning board, coming up with master plans, for example, in the case of the infra projects, so that it cannot be that each one would just be asking on something and then there’s no global or national plan on this particular…and I’m referring already to the flood control investments,’ Balanquit said, adding that the agency is back to its ‘regular programming.’
‘We know that flood control projects are not intrinsically evil, so they do a lot of good to our people. We just need to step back, to pull back a bit,’ the DBM official emphasized.
While the flood control scandal cost the economy ‘a lot,’ he said there is a need to go back to regular programming and ensure that there will be ‘kind of reassessment and revalidation of those existing projects, and a clear assurance that we can now have a green light to proceed and finish those projects.’
Apart from public construction, Balanquit said household consumption and private investments also slowed down.
‘So we need to clean up a bit and do some kind of, I would consider it like a cleansing diet, so that we’ll be able to have more nourishment moving forward. And I think now we are in full throttle. We have set all the necessary mechanisms so that these things that happen in 2025 will not be repeated again,’ he added.
When the flood control corruption scandal broke in July 2025, infrastructure spending had been down since the second half of last year due to stricter billing validation of Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) projects.